On finding boards that didn't creak

...a memory on Mother's Day

Just before the accident, I’d begun to ghost a book for a name-brand doctor. The corporate client was told I “hurt my back” and they were willing to wait. After three months, not so much.

I couldn’t say I was no longer able to read. I couldn’t say I was no longer able to write. I couldn’t say I had been hit by a drunk with a truck. I couldn’t say I no longer knew who they were, what they looked like, or what I ever did for them.

If you can’t think, you can’t work. If you can’t work, you can’t pay the bills. Four months after the accident, Steven, my business manager, told the client there were problems with my back, but didn’t mention my brain.

As Steven had intuited, I never got another paycheck, never did another job. He refunded “my” five-figure advance to my former client, a global behemoth known from Burundi to Beverly Hills.

He retained realtors to sell our home and auctioneers to sell our possessions, among them, many treasures. My father’s books. My mother’s piano.

We lived in a small cozy farmhouse built in 1824 which we “saved” from becoming one of the faux chateaux fast replacing homes like ours. I couldn’t comprehend losing it. My daughter could. I also couldn’t comprehend distance, direction, or time, or living nine hours south of my child. This was above my new head.

On our last night, she and I slept on the old floor of her room, which was stripped of furnishings and would no longer be her room. I looked at the wallpaper I selected before she was born. I looked at the moldings, the old doors and cabinets, the cracked white pine floors, which, unlike us, could stay where they belonged.

Also at the tall windows we loved, which also could stay where they belonged, looking out at the huge old evergreens and the younger trees we had planted. I looked at the front porch, the back porch, the old barn, the old well, the crooked floors. They stayed. We could not. So did the spot where we buried Mister Cat.

But back to the white pine floors. When she was tiny, my daughter slept in a bassinet beside my bed. My bedroom had crooked, cracked wood floors, too, which creaked a bit when you stepped on them. When I woke for work each day, I walked with care on the boards that didn’t creak so as not to wake her up.