Mary T. Wagner

Running With Stilettos

Empty Nest

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My official notice that my nest was finally going to be really and truly empty for the first time in 36 years came, without warning, in the mail. After a thoroughly lovely, sunny morning spent at an art museum with a friend, I had returned home and then checked the mailbox by the front door. I leafed casually through the assortment of bills and catalogs and other junk, and then there it was.

A perky, colorful notice from the postal service verifying that my younger daughter was officially changing her mailing address to a city across the country.

This wasn’t actually “news” in the strictest sense. She’d been gone for several months, and this new location was something she’d been working at putting roots down in for a long time. It was a very good thing for my daughter, in fact, by any measure. She had had something of a love-hate relationship with that particular city for a number of years and had come and gone from there on more than one occasion, but this time the place just felt “right” for all the right reasons.

But all of that cool mature rationality didn’t stop me from standing at the kitchen sink and bursting into tears. Go figure.

Since my first child was born (the “training baby” that paved the way for the next three) I’ve tended a nest in one form or another. For most of that time it was a nest in the country that grew to have five bedrooms and was surrounded by acres of fields and woods, hawks and foxes and deer and birds of all feathers. And while my fledglings were young, there was plenty of hiking and cookie-baking and story-reading and minivan-driving that utterly and joyfully consumed my life and identity. I didn’t skip a beat at keeping that nest in place even after I went to law school and then the marriage collapsed after twenty five years. With teenagers still in high school, I kept trimming the Christmas tree and cooking dinner and baking cookies and keeping the spare bedrooms primed and ready for the older ones to use when they came home from college.

Then, at last, I sold that large place and moved to much smaller digs a couple of years ago. Now if I want to visit the forest primeval, I actually have to get in my car and drive there, though the drive is quite short. And yet…it still has a spare bedroom and that is very important to me.

For the past several years, my younger daughter has still called my location “home” as she has come and gone at various times to other parts of the country for professional or personal reasons. She is an artist who practices in a physically demanding art form, and she has a severe chronic illness, and she is the bravest person I know. And somehow the fact that I could still keep a safe landing pad for her kept me on an even keel despite the wrenching emotional upheaval of moving from the only stable home I’d known in my own life.

I’m pretty sure one could draw a direct line from my own life experience to the importance I place on having that “nest.”

The simplest way to describe my family’s functioning would be to say that my mother was in charge. Nothing of importance happened without her approval, and often times at her initiative. I remember that no matter where she was, she always wanted to be elsewhere. She is now 94 and widowed and has been crippled for decades. She lives in a very nice apartment with a good view of a river and a majestic historic building that she loves to see as the sun sets, and friends and excellent amenities for wheelchair accessibility, and she is still striving for one more move.

This did not generally lend itself to a feeling of tremendous permanence as I was growing up. But a particularly disastrous initiative had us leave my native Chicago when I was sixteen in order to move to an abandoned farm in northern Wisconsin with no plumbing except a kitchen sink. The nearest town had 143 people and that was two miles away.

In order to continue my education at a Catholic high school, I was sent off to a small city forty miles away and I boarded there, at least for the first few months, with a family recommended by the high school principal. It didn’t go well. I came back to the farm every weekend, and there was literally no room there for me. There were only two bedrooms in the unfinished farmhouse. My parents slept in one; my younger brother slept in the other one, which had just enough room for a twin bed nestled against one wall and a dresser tight up against the other. I remember having to sleep in a hammock in the living room when I came home for the weekends. And things only went downhill from there.

In short, any illusion of having firm ground beneath my feet vanished when I was sixteen, replaced by a yawning, inarticulate terror of abandonment and isolation that has haunted me through the rest of my life. It drove making some of my biggest life decisions, and blinded or paralyzed me from making others. My parents and brother moved back to Chicago four years after leaving it for the farm and picked up at the same address they had left off. It was too late for me not to have been utterly broken.

Fast forward to college, marriage and motherhood. As one, then two, then three, and finally four children arrived, I found an incredible source of fulfillment and happiness in making a stable home for them. With every bedtime story, every Halloween costume sewn, every batch of cookies baked, every Christmas stocking hung by the fireplace, I could feel something heal inside myself.

As they grew older, of course, their needs changed. Instead of fresh diapers, a corsage for the prom. Instead of lunch in a brown paper bag, money for gas. Instead of help preparing for a science quiz, reassurance that a major life decision was a good one. And so it went, through the college years and beyond.

Bringing me, inevitably, to the arrival of the change-of-address noticed that sent me, at least for the rest of that day, into a bruised and weepy tailspin. If there had been a pint of Hagen Daz ice cream in the freezer, I would have eaten it right out of the carton.

I have dried my tears since then, put my chin up, and claimed the entire bathroom counter for myself since I no longer have to share. And with the approaching Christmas holiday doings, I haven’t had much time or inclination to brood.

But there is a new year about to start in just another couple of weeks. The turn of the calendar from one year to the next is always a time for reflection on the past and optimism for the future. Sometimes I make resolutions, and sometimes I don’t.

This time around I hope I’ll make some adjustments in my thinking. I’m already known for relentless optimism as a coping mechanism, but let’s take the glass-half-full analogy a step farther and say that when all is said and done, my nest isn’t quite empty yet. None of my kids may be getting their mail sent to my house anymore, but I’m still here, along with the four-footed pets. And so I might as well start picturing and investing in my current surroundings as a warm, comforting nest for myself.

Because you know, after all these years, I have damn well earned it.

Boxing Day Bonfire

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Bonfire

The “burn pile” in the backyard stood nearly five feet tall, a spiky assemblage of branches, sticks, vines, and firewood. It completely overran the neat and tidy edges of the fire pit created for occasional use two decades before. It was a mute testament to many things, among them the fact that I own a small chainsaw and I’m not afraid to use it, and that nature abhors a vacuum so yard work is a necessary fact of life.

Particularly when the yard is part of a fourteen acre wooded parcel. Mother nature never stops trying to reclaim the civilized part of it, the “lawn” part that gets cut with a mower and trimmed along the edges and even sports several flower beds. For that matter, there are a lot more “woods” to the parcel than there were thirty-odd years ago when we first built a home there and raised a family. The forest continues to migrate toward the house. For the record, the “we” part has changed as well in those years, as the phrase “separate ways” came to apply to a marriage of 25 years.

But the empty nest I got in the divorce years ago was temporarily re-occupied by two of my four adult children over the holidays, and my son, visiting from the far side of the country, eyed the burn pile with longing. “Hey, he asked, “can we light this thing up before I leave?”

“Sure,” I said amiably, although I had my doubts. It had been rainy and damp for a good deal of the late fall leading up to winter, and the early snow that had capped the pile had melted all the way through it. In fact the pile included some half-burned wood that marked the last time I tried to set fire to it, with little success.

Still, I took comfort in remembering some of the lessons and advice I had taken from the man with the longbow and the pipe and the black leather pants who had been in my life for the past several years, although he was absent now too, the sharp pang of parting still nearly fresh. During the time we were together I’d learned how to take apart and reassemble my chain saw; learned the difference between primer and regular paint; and learned that “you can burn just about anything with enough lighter fluid.”

This last had been underscored the night he took it upon himself to carve up a tree branch roughly the size of a small school bus that had cracked and broken away from the rest of a tree by the house in a recent storm. I couldn’t fathom that wood that green and newly cut would catch fire. I was wrong—a lot of lighter fluid was involved—and the evening turned out to be quite magical, if exhausting.

Back in the present, I kept an eye on the weather and the burn pile during the week of Christmas. It rained, of course, but Christmas Day finally came without fog and damp and mist, and the sticks and vines dried out a little. And so on the evening of the day after Christmas, less than twelve hours before my son and I would leave at four in the morning to get him to the airport for his return flight, my daughter and son and I gathered around the fire pit with some matches and a quart and a half of lighter fluid, and a hose in the grass nearby just in case of emergency.

Earlier in the day, I had walked the trail around my place with the critters, and hauled back roughly five pounds of fallen pine cones sporting gobs of sticky sap which I then salted the pile of brush and branches with.

And then against all odds and reason—and with several reapplications of lighter fluid—the pile finally “caught” and we stood around it, talking, sharing, and gazing into both the past and the future.

The past, in a very real and tangible way. There had been many bonfires in this fire pit over the many years we had lived here together. They had involved s’mores, and beer, and music, and laughter, and reflection, and connection, and celebration. Graduations, birthdays, friendships, all had been honored at the outskirts of a blazing fire in the back yard with a big sky above us. It was not lost on the three of us that with the empty nest up for sale, this could very well be the last bonfire we would share in the backyard of the home they had known since they were born. We all know and accept that the idea of me moving from this large and wonderful place “makes sense” on so many practical levels. But we will all still mourn the magic of having the wild just outside our back door, and the comfort of “home” to return to. This literally has been the only stable home I’ve ever known in my life, and I will miss it dreadfully some day when I finally drive away for the last time.

And I personally viewed this particular huge pile of yard waste through the lens of wrestling Mother Nature to a draw a couple of months earlier, tackling a stand of trash trees and serpentine wild vines that had encircled a couple of young maple trees at the edge of the yard, hobbling their lower branches and overshadowing a wildflower bed I had planted nearby. I had hacked, and cut, and dragged and stacked until I was too exhausted to do more, but by the time I finished, the maples stood on the cusp of their autumn brilliance, ready to blaze in splendor without interference.

We all looked into the weight of the year gone past us too. All three of us had seen some mighty and significant professional accomplishments…and had known disappointments, both personal and creative, along the way as well. The flames licked and curled around the chunks of wood in the pile, turning them red and orange and gold and white hot, reducing them as they broke and settled to glowing, fractured hints of their former solidity. We celebrated the good stuff…and felt the weight and the pain of our past disappointments burn off and scatter as tiny, glowing embers lifted high above us on a channel of hot air rising from the middle of the fire. The night was warm and windless, and clouds covered the dark sky above. It felt and looked as though we created our own stars in the heavens that night.

And so the sparks carried away the past, and reduced some of it to ashes, and carried our hopes for the future aloft into the night, into the cosmos, into the air around us, into the Great Unknown of the future. And for a simple bonfire in the back yard on the night after Christmas, you couldn’t possibly want for more than that.

New GB frontiers!

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I first stumbled across Growing Bolder back in 2008 when…just wait for it…I was trying to find something else. Seriously, isn’t that the way most good things happen?

I have to really laugh now when I think that we were both literally “works in progress” at the time. I had recently published my first book, “Running with Stilettos,” and was browsing the web late one night, trying to figure out how to contact the producers of “Menopause the Musical!” for a possible shout-out for my essay collection based on my blog of the same name.

And as luck would have it, I saw a small banner ad for something new called “Growing Bolder,” and the name just pulled me right in! I sensed a natural fit, and immediately reached out. I started with the short synopsis—former journalist and soccer mom, now an attorney and author—but saved the best for last.

“I’m a 52 year old woman currently shopping for my first motorcycle jacket. ‘Growing Bolder’? Definitely!!” (I also admitted that when it came to mastering technology, I was “a few steps beyond a quill pen…but not by much.”)

And the rest, as they say, is history…very fond history! While I continued to write for my own Running with Stilettos blog, there were plenty of things that I just naturally turned to Growing Bolder to share first. I’ve been with GB since before I bought that motorcycle jacket, before I ever spent a weekend at Chicago’s Printers Row Lit Fest selling and signing books, before I learned to enjoy standing up in front of a crowd to read an essay, before I “ran the Rocky stairs” in Philadelphia with my son, before I ever thought of myself as a photographer, before I sat at my father’s deathbed. And the power of words was never more real or clear to me than when I shared a piece I wrote for Growing Bolder during the last awful stretch of my elderly father’s decline. I wrote about bringing my dog, Bandit, to the nursing home to visit. I called it “Have Dog Will Travel,” and instead of a dirge it was a warm reflection on a wonderful old retriever, himself well along in years, and his attempts to play with my father.

I then I shared the post in an email to my writers’ group in Chicago, to let people know about the stormy seas I had recently been traveling, and I got a response from a person who I have never met but still remember. Her circumstances dealing with failing parents was even worse and more dire than mine, but she found both connection and hope in the essay, and I still feel humbled when I think of it.

And then just look at Growing Bolder over the past few years! Radio! Television! Magazine! Film production! And a quarter million “likes” on Facebook! 

And so I am absolutely thrilled to death to be included in the ranks of the newly redesigned Growing Bolder blogging team as we both embark on new frontiers. And if the past is any predictor of the future, it’s the ones we don’t expect that will be the most challenging and rewarding!