The Key
by Eloise Hawking
Chapter 8
By 9:00 I was showered, my hair was washed and combed, and
my teeth were brushed and gleaming white.
I put on my softest PJ’s. My
favorite TV show was on and the last couple of minutes of the episode would
finish up just after the commercial break.
I felt clean, content, and comfortable.
A sigh of relaxation escaped me.
“Ellen! Turn that TV
down!” yelled my mother. “I have a
splitting headache and that noise is not helping it one bit! Your channel drives me crazy. The commercials are so loud!”
Contentment interrupted.
Mom better not watch
the weather channel with Grandma then, I thought.
My mom got lots of headaches, usually by
bedtime every night and was very sensitive to noise. The worse her headache was, the more she
yelled, which didn’t make any sense to me if she was sensitive to noise.
“In fact,” she bellowed, “turn the TV off! I want you in bed a little earlier
tonight. We have a big night
tomorrow. The Huskies play the
Wildcats.” Mom was talking about high
school football, her favorite sport. We
rarely missed a game.
I flicked off the TV and headed upstairs. My bedroom was on the second floor of our
house, as were the bedrooms of my brother and sister. We all met in one of our rooms every night
for a Bible story and prayers.
My foot
no sooner hit the top step when I heard the voice of my mother resonate from my
brother’s room—looks like it was his turn to host the bedtime ceremony
tonight. “Cinderella, will you please go
make sure the cat has water? Amtrak is
sleeping at our house tonight. I forgot
to do it and if it doesn’t get done right now, he’ll be pawing my head in the
middle of the night.”
I sighed and turned around.
It would be nice if she remembered to tell me these things before I get
to step fourteen.
“I didn’t see you roll your eyes at me, did I Ellen?” said the muffled voice coming from behind the
door of my brother’s room.
How could she see me through the door, anyway? So what if I
rolled my eyes? That was beside the
point.
As I rounded the doorway into the kitchen and headed to
Amtrak’s dish, something didn’t seem right.
The water looked funny. I wear
glasses, and don’t wear them to bed, but I could still tell something was funky
with the cat’s water. When I picked up
the bowl, the water was thick and pink.
I brought it up to my nose and took a whiff and inhaled----ketchup. No wonder the ketchup bottle felt so light!
My twenty year old feline friend was already winding in and
out of my legs like he does every time he wants to be fed. Sam got to his cat kibble too. It looked like he emptied nearly the entire
economy sized bottle on top of it! What
a mess! I knew in the end I’d catch heat
for it as I was the one in charge of kitchen clean up tonight. My only hope was to get rid of the evidence.
I hurriedly dumped the water down the kitchen sink, but it
was thick so it didn’t go down right away.
It needed some time to drain. So
while the water was draining, I dumped the ketchuped kibble into the garbage
and decided that I best get rid of the bag.
I walked the full
garbage bag out to the cans behind the woodpile out back where my grandparents
and I keep our garbage. I looked at the
tilted can that grandpa repaired and I couldn’t help but giggle. I thought it would be safer to put our
garbage in grandpa’s can just in case my parents looked through our garbage for
some a lost item like we sometimes do.
It is a regular occurrence in our house because Mom loses her keys so
often. The last hope of finding any lost
items is always digging through the garbage.
I know because I’ve been assigned that gross task a time or two. However, when I took off the lid to deposit
our bag, the wheel fell off.
Oh
shoot! Grandpa would be so disappointed
if he knew his contraption failed. I did
the best I could to prop it up against the neighboring can and said a prayer
that grandpa didn’t notice.
When I got back to the house, I added a clean bag to the
garbage, got Amtrak some new food. The
thick ketchup water finally drained but left a pink ring around our swanstone
colored sink. Mom said a tan sink was
her biggest regret when they built our house because it showed every
stain. In this case, it would show the
evidence, so I had to scrub out the sink.
As I was sudsing the last of the ketchup residue, I heard my mother’s
impatience resonating through the floorboards once again.
“Ellen Louise! What
are you doing?” Mom yelled from upstairs.
“I asked you to do one simple task and you do nothing but dawdle. Get your little hiney up here right this
instant!” So much for her headache and
the sound sensitivity.
As I made it into Sam’s bedroom, Dad was finishing up the
last part of the David and Golliath story.
Darn. That was my favorite one
and I missed it. Wouldn’t it be great to
kill a giant with just a sling and a stone?
I wish I could be brave like that.
Sam was curled in my mother’s lap sucking his blanket. He does this before he goes to sleep. He held open his arms for me to pick him
up. I grabbed him and half lifted him
and half dragged him onto his bed where I lay down next to him. I wondered how much longer I could physically
do that because he was growing so fast.
He was already half my weight. I
plopped him onto his bed and he flopped on top of me while we said our prayers.
Hope led the prayers tonight. Because she likes to do the same things over and over, she is good at reciting prayers, although she doesn’t always get all the words right. For example, tonight she said the Lord’s prayer. In Hope’s version, it went like this:
|
We’ve all become so used to Hope’s version that no one
laughs anymore. My mother and father are
over it, and Sam is too little to know.
Hope is so proud of herself .
Only the Lord himself knows how much damage we are doing to Sam by
exposing him to prayers in this odd way.
I asked my mom about that once and she just flatly said, “That is
something his therapist will help him sort out later.”
“Ok troops, move ‘em out!” said Mom. “Time to hit the hay.”
“We’re not allowed to hit.
Hitting is not nice,” said Sam sitting bolt upright in his bed.
“That’s right, Sam,” I said.
“You should have remembered that before you took a swing at me in the
tree house.”
“Sorry, Onion,” said Sam.
He looked like he truly meant it this time. We are not allowed to go to bed angry in our
house, so I forgave him…… this time.
Sam looked down at his knuckles and decided that he needed a
new bandage, a drink, and said that he
felt something stuck between his teeth and needed to floss them. My nickname for him is the Little King of
Stalling. Mom sighed and followed Sam to
the bathroom. The bathroom door clicked
shut and from behind it I heard Sam’s muffled voice say, “I want a sling shot.”
Another muffled voice came from behind the bathroom
door. This time it was Mom. “Go ahead and start without me, Ellen.”
Mom and I read together every night. She usually has me start by reading a page or
two aloud. I have to admit, my mother
picks some great books for me to read.
She should have been a librarian.
I told her that once and she said that she would hate shushing people
all day long.
I walked into the bedroom lit with the soft light from my
“Light Up the World” globe, a gift from Mother Eloise for my 8th
birthday. I pulled my book from my night
stand and began reading aloud from The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by
Kate DiCamillo. The story was about the
journey of a stuffed animal rabbit. It
was a great book but some of the words were a little hard.
When I’d come to a word I didn’t know, Mother Eloise would
never just let me skip it. She always
made me guess what I thought it meant from the context clues from the rest of
the story. She would always say, “Good
guess.” Not “yes, you got it right” or
“No—wrong—here’s what it means.”
Mother
Eloise always expected me to look it up for myself the next day and come tell
her what I found out. Mom says that it
is not always the end result that is important, like finding the answer, it’s
the journey you take to get there when you learn something. My trip wasn’t too far tonight because for
the last few nights I knew all of the words on my pages.
Creak. The bathroom
door opened. Six padded footsteps then a
stop at the door of my bedroom.
Mom
stuck her head inside. “If you get
going, you can finish that book tonight.
It would be nice to be done before the weekend. Read loud so I can hear you.”
Mom busied herself, moving in and out of our bedrooms
getting our clothes ready for the next day.
She set them out in three neat little piles for easy dressing the next
morning. Mom would tidy up our rooms,
pick up Sam’s stray toys, and collect the laundry, listening all the
while.
I read:
|
“…the hopeful light of spring……I like that…” mused
Mother. “Remember that in April,
Ellen. Look for the hopeful light of
spring.”
I continued:
|
I stopped reading and put the cbook down against my
chest. “Poor, Edward! I feel so sorry for him, Mom.”
Mom looked over to me and tipped her head. My mother and I were connected in such a way
we could often communicate without words.
I knew she wasn’t sure what I meant.
I clarified, “He’s there all alone. Years of waiting. How lonely would that be?”
Mom crossed the room and sat on the edge of my bed. She looked me right in the eyes and said,
“You are never alone, Ellen. God is
always with you.” Her blue eyes looked
warm and soft and I no longer saw any evidence of a headache.
I smiled and nodded my head, not wanting to break the hold
of her stare.
“That’s the best thing about God,” Mom continued. “You can call on His name anywhere, anytime,
and He will come help you.” She reached
out her long, bony finger and rubbed it against my cheek.
“Continue,” she suggested.
|
“…..so what is Edward waiting for, Ellen?” interrupted
Mom.
I put the book down again and looked at her before I
answered the obvious question. “For
someone to come and buy him.”
“Well of course,” she replied. “A chimpanzee could figure out that. What is Edward really waiting for?”
Here we go again. I
sighed and picked the book back up. Mom stood and pulled back the corner of my
comforter and crawled in bed next to me.
This was more comforting than any comforter could ever make me. Mom extended her arm, palm up, as a signal
that she wanted me to give her the book.
It was an unspoken language between my mother and I. I knew when she was ready to take over, and
she knew just the perfect place to pick up the reading.
She read:
|
“Dogwood blossoms,” she repeated. “ Did you ever see dogwood blossoms in the
spring, Ellen?”
I shook my head no.
Mom reached over and bonked me in the head with the
book. “Well, you should have. We have a dogwood growing very near to our
yard. We can see it blossom every
spring.”
“Oh,” I said. “Where
is it?”
Mother smiled her knowing smile. “I guess that sounds like a weekend mystery
for you to solve. Where is the dogwood
tree in our yard, and what do the blossoms look like?”
“That’s gonna be hard cuz its not gonna have flowers in the
fall,” I said yawning.
“That is going to be
hard because its not going to have flowers in the fall,”
mother enunciated. She was a stickler
about articulation in case I wanted to be an anchor person on the news
someday. All I was really concerned
about was passing fourth grade.
“I can tell by your language you are getting tired. Let’s call it a night. You can think about what Edward is looking
for as you drift off to dreamland,” said Mom as she took my book and placed it
on my night stand. “Let’s see where you
are headed off to tonight.”
Mom spun the Light Up the World Globe and I extended my
pointer finger. The globe whirled around
and the countries all blended together like one big continent. After a few seconds I pushed my finger
downward to stop the spinning. We both
leaned in to see where my finger landed.
“Slovenia?” I asked.
“…once part of Yugoslavia.
Gained its independence in 1991.
Cool history. You’ll have to look
it up some time.”
How my mother knew all this information sometimes bewildered
me. I mentally added that to the list of
other things to think about like dogwood trees and what stuffed rabbits were
waiting for.
“Oh, and another thing,” said Mom. “I noticed your cell phone battery was
low. You may want to charge it up over
night.”
I glanced at my cell phone across the room on my dresser.
Suddenly that seemed very far away to me.
I can’t take my phone to school anyway because it is against the school
rules. I could just do it in the morning
and let it charge all day. “OK—I’ll do
it in a minute,” I lied.
I have to admit, I was getting sleepy. I wiggled down under my blankets. Mom pulled up my covers and gave me a kiss on
my cheek. “Good night, Cinderella. Have a good sleep.”
Mother picked up the laundry basket and headed toward the
door. She glanced at my bulletin board
on the way out of my room, paused and said, “I see you found your lunch note
today,” gesturing to it. “Did you figure
out what it means?”
“I didn’t look up the verse yet. Old Testament, right?” I said.
“New,” mom replied.
“But it’s getting late. You can’t
search for an answer when you’re too tired.
You’ll be too weary to even know you found it. I’m sure you’ll figure it out when you are
ready.”
Mom still looked
tired, but her headache must have subsided enough for her to be able to read to
me.
“You must have a headache from all
of that thinking about dogwood trees and rabbits and Slovenians and
Hebrews. Time to get some sleep. Adequate sleep is one of the keys to good
health.”
She closed the door and reminded me again about tomorrow’s
football game, informing me that I could bring a friend along if I wanted
to.
Cool. But for now, The Sandman had arrived. My eyes were getting grainy and dogwood trees
and the Hebrews and weakly charged cell phones could all wait until
tomorrow.
Mother’s last words echoed through my head for just an
instant. I wonder if……..the
key………………..to all…………………..things ………………..is……………………….adequa…………………………
No comments:
Post a Comment