Homage to Latonia Barto

Death comes for us all.  No one is getting out of here alive.  It is inevitable.  How we live between birth and death is what matters, not how it ends.  Every death touches us all.  Each life lost is a detriment to the entire world.  We are all human: gay, straight, cisgenered, transgendered, Muslim, Christian, Pagan, Democrat, Republican, Black, White, Yankee, and Southerner.

I’ve known love, and I’ve known loss.  One thing I know for sure is we all return, whether in animal or human form, or as a single drop of rain.  We as beings, both human and otherwise, seek this life, this existence.  We choose this life. 

The dead tell me what they crave the most is being with the living.  Being with the ones they left behind.  They can do little more than watch.  All life that passes away returns to us, if we are smart enough to see it.  It is a circle, ebbing and flowing without end, endlessly repeating.  It is dizzying, mesmerizing and heart breaking all at once.

My thoughts have turned to death, because earlier this week my beloved friend and spiritual soul sister LaTonia passed threw the veil.  She was a beautiful, kind, loving woman who never believed in limits or labels.  I pray she finds peace and rest on the other side.  For the last 7 years she battled Leiomyosarcoma, or smooth muscle cancer, but she was so much more then cancer.  She was a constant fountain of giving and creating.  She was a talented artist in what ever medium she chose. 

Those of you following along know that I met Melinda in a yarn meeting and that we were part of a group called Chicks-with-Sticks.  I have been into fiber arts since I was 11 and re-learned to crochet at Barbara’s feet.  Oma had taught me when I was little, in fact it is part of my first memory, but I forgot as I got older.  I have continued crocheting most of my life, learning to knit, weave, spin, sew, and tat along the way.  If it has a needle involved I want to learn to do it. 

I met LaTonia many years ago in a Chicks-with-Sticks meeting.  For many years we all coexisted happily together.  When Melinda and I parted company (Billy the Exterminator) I basically left the group.  I did not want to run the chance of seeing Melinda.  I went to one more meeting around Christmas to find out that the lady who ran Chicks-with-Sticks, was leaving.  Her work had changed and she was tired of all of the drama that Melinda and I brought to the group, all though she never put it like that.  It was all implied.  I was ashamed and embarrassed that I had caused so much trouble, so I left and did not come back for many years.

A chance meeting with LaTonia one day at the Pines Road Library brought it all back into perspective.  She threw her arms around me and just held me so tight.  She said, “Where have you been?  I’ve missed you!”  I told her how bad I felt about breaking up the group, and that I didn’t want to run back into Melinda.  She said that there was a new group called “Yarn Play.”  They were meeting at the same time, in the same place, with most of the same people, minus Melinda.  She had not been around in some time.  She invited me back.  I told her I already had Druid on Saturday, but I would try to see if I could balance two meetings at once. 

I did.  I came back and it was like I never left.  I joined my sisters in stitching and bitching ever Saturday.  When I stopped going to Druid after all the problems I had with D&K (Goat Problems) Yarn Play became as close to a coven as I had, for more than a year.  Although almost every woman there was a Christian, they were the women I went to with questions, my hopes, my joys, my fears.  They were my tribe of elders, although many of them were my age or younger.  Since Juno and I patched things up and I went back to my Druid meetings, I am back to balancing both meetings.  Yarn play in the mornings and Druid in the afternoons. 

LaTonia’s health was never far from our minds, especially towards the end.  Once we all got settled with our knitting or crochet projects, and if she was not there, we would ask where she was and how she was fairing.  LaTonia I think often shared with us, and not with many others, at least part of her struggle.  She once told me she stopped telling her extended family what was going on with her medically ‘cause she could not handle the drama.  I think they often saw her as broken and fragile, when she was perfectly capable, she just had cancer.  What stories were shared in Yarn Play I will not print here.  We keep each other’s confidences, and confessions. 

LaTonia continued to create beautiful and inspiring pieces of fiber art, whether in crochet or knit.  I don’t think she knew how to not create.  She made blankets for the Linus Project, hats for the cancer center, creating even when her hands shook. As I began to understand that her time was growing short, I encouraged her to begin looking at her projects still in progress, or “on the needle” as we say, and decide who should finish them and what should happen to them.  Last Saturday I watched as friend bound off a blanket LaTonia had been working on for about a year.  I knew if she had finally given up her projects, she was letting go.  I knew it would not be long.  She died the next day.

In November 2015, I began to write my first real novel, which is at the moment called “The Treehouse.”  LaTonia’s beauty and artistic ability became the inspiration for one of my main characters, who I named Anne.  Her beautiful son Gabe, became the inspiration for Anne’s son, and namesake.  I would call or message her with questions I had, about growing up biracial, Gabe, and motherhood.  We became even closer.  I gave her all that I had written.  One of the great joys of my life came at my 40^th birthday, when she told me she liked what I had written and had made a connection with Anne.  It was the greatest complement she could have ever given me, and I cried.  As LaTonia began to slip from us, I felt as if Anne was dying as well.  Since her death, it has taken me some weeks to get back to working on my book. 

I had had a phone conversation with LaTonia about a week before she passed away.  She told me she was not ready, that she wanted to stay.  She fought until the end striving to stay around for her son and her husband.  I asked her one time if she knew how long she had left to live.  She said, “I don’t want to know.”  She believed having an idea of the date of her death, would limit the quality of her life.  Latonia was a woman who always beat the odds.  Most of those diagnosed with her type of cancer live 3 years from time of diagnosis, 5 if you are lucky, she lived 7.  I believe because she attacked the disease both physically, emotionally and spiritually. 

She was a complex woman with a complicated history, just like all of us are.  Her smile, zest for life, optimism, patience, smile, laugh, and encouragement to those around us was infectious.  Her’s was a life lived fearlessly in love and compassion.  We are all the better for having known her. 

Ilsa

Bronchitis

Well hello family, and happy New Year.  This is my first post of the New Year.  It’s January 22, 2016, and I have been down for about 10 days now.  I got, what I hope, is my yearly case of Bronchitis.  I have talked, at nauseam, I am quite sure about my many cases of bronchitis.  Sorry folks, those are just the facts, kind of like my hair is brown, I am married to Jay, and at least once a year, since the age of 6, I get bronchitis.  I have talked to you about this in Blood in the Water, The family secret, and The healing power of music.  

This case we caught early.  I am lucky enough to have a doctor who I can call and say, “I’ve got it again,” and they will call in meds for me.  They have seen me have it enough, and I have had it enough to diagnose myself.  I know what meds work for me and what don’t.  You know you are sick when you WANT to rub Vicks on yourself!

It does not take much for me to get it, and I am always in a preventative phase.  I monitor my allergies and try to take meds if I am sniffling too much or I am congested.  I know that my sinuses dripping on my vocal cords, will cause a sore throat and it is all downhill from there.  I have seen me go to bed fine and wake up with a full blown case of Bronchitis.  It was kind of like that this time.

Jay and I don’t have a lot of money.  There are weeks where I have to ration out the wash powder and the milk.  We get by, and do what we can, where we can.  This year we did not have the $500 to $600, plus the tank rental fee, to fill up the propane tank, that runs both the heater and the stove.  This caused great upset in the family, a few months ago when I first came to understand this, but all is well now.  I am blessed with warm clothes, 2 space heaters, and many blankets.  The children have sweaters and I am always covering them up, checking ears and paws to see if they are cold.  Lots of people have done a lots more with a lot less. 

Every day I worry that I will run out of gas to cook with, but the stove is still going.  Should it run out I have a grill, and a camp stove.  I also could gather fire wood and cook outside.  I am not opposed to such as our ancestors have done that for millennia.  Hell that is still done in many parts of the world today.  Jay promises that he will not let it come to that.  He says when the gas runs out, he will rig up a 5 gallon refillable Propane bottle to our lines, and we will have gas that way.  I trust him, he has not let me down yet.

 Now I am not trying to tell you a sob story to get y’all to set me up a Go Fund me account, or for somebody to lend us the money to fill up the tank.  No even if we borrowed the money, and there is nobody to borrow it from, we, I don’t think, would be able to pay it back.  What a rich person might spend on a dress or shoes, would take us several years to pay back.  Just the facts of the working poor people, I am just trying to tell it like it is.  We will find a solution to our own problems, and I am sure there are layers of lessons the Gods are teaching us here.  I keep thinking of JK Rowling’s writing her first book in the café’s, because she didn’t have any heat either.  Maybe it will help to get my creative juices flowing.

So we have been saving the running of the heater for our freezing nights, and days when I just can’t get warm.  I think it has been on a handful of times since it started getting cold.  Hell we had the AC on Christmas Eve!  We had our first night of freezing the other night, in fear of the pipes freezing, I convinced Jay to turn on the heater, although he said the ones that always freeze are the ones outside.  Pipes were fine the next morning, but we were not.  Both of us woke up with sore throats.  My guess is when we turned on the heater, it blew out all that dust and that’s what did it.  Jay is fine, he is always fine, a day or so later my coughing started. 

I got meds, but still did not feel all that bad, and I went on and did my usual things, just 10 times slower, which is greatly annoying to me.  Despite not feeling that bad, I probably should have gone to bed and stayed there, but guilt eats at me.  I constantly hear the voice of those who said/ say they loved me, now mixed with my own, call me fat, lazy, crazy, and useless in my head.  I know since I don’t “carry my own weight” by bringing home a pay check, I have to work as hard as I can, as much as I can, pushing through pain, depression, and anything else that might try to block what I have to do.  Jay has never, and would never say such things to me, and in truth it has gotten better over the years.  But it still does not seem fair to me, for Jay to work all day long, and have to come home and tend to house, make dinner, and wash clothes.  Yes there are days when I can’t, and I have to ask, but it is not something I like. 

So I get sick and then a few days later Jay starts this project that we have been planning for a while.  We had a hole in our floor in the living room, don’t start me in on why you should never ever buy a trailer.  We decided instead of ripping out all the floor, we would lay ¾” plywood over the top and polyurethane over the top of it.  It looks really nice.  So much better than trying to mop a floor that had broken and missing peal and stick tiles over it.  I have 7 dogs sharing our home and a goat that thinks she’s a dog.  Pee is simply a fact of life in my house people.  You just can’t mop that out of particle board. 

Since Jay and I got together, some 13 years ago now, we will celebrate our 12^th year of marriage in March, Gods willing, I have helped him with every project.  When we built the porch, I helped him carry the 16ft pressure treated posts, learned to use a nail gun, and dug holes (sometimes with a soup spoon) and help add concrete to them.  When we built Bridget’s house, I helped him raise the walls, and then held them in place while he shot it with the nail gun.  Other then paint, which I do mainly by myself, since he hates to paint, I have helped him with every project he has ever done in this house.  From nailing, ripping out floor, putting in pipe, re-running water lines, putting in electricity to somewhere, and cutting insulation. I am a good helper.  I try to think two steps ahead of him, as to what he will need, even if it is just something cold to drink. 

For the first time, this week, I watched him do a project on his own.  I watched him struggle with heavy boards, in and out of the front door.  It broke my heart that all I could do was sit at the kitchen table and watch.  Not make him dinner (although I did help with that one night and spent the next few days in bed after that) not bring him something to drink, nothing, all I could do was watch this beautiful man try to make our lives a little better.  Not only did he do that, but he cooked for me, tended me, and fussed at me to put socks on, go back to bed and encouraged me to sleep all day.  I was overcome with love for him and immense gratitude. 

This has been on my heart for days to write this to you, but I have had no strength to do so.  Finally today the Polyurethane is dry and I have my desk back to write you from.  We have rearranged the living room, now instead of looking at the goat barn, at Kay’s house, and who is coming down the drive.  I am looking down the hill, to Jay’s gun range, what is left of the old circle, and the now blocked path, down to the creek, and the other 11 acres beyond that.  I see lots of trees, some that have fallen down and need to be cut, but Kevin stole our chain saw, you know the one that never did work right.  Joke was on him.  And I see a little Ms. Bridget, who is rubbing her horn on the dead Dog Fennel plants, and standing in the sunshine.  Wonder if this view will inspire me the way the other does.  You know when we first moved out here, we had this area I am looking at, oh about a 40 x 80 section, fenced off for the dogs.  But as those of you who own Dachshunds know, there is no such thing as Dachshund proof fencing.  No matter how we patched or what we did, they kept getting out.  Finally we gave up and just tore it all down. 

I love it here, I never want to leave, my only regret is that I cannot be buried here.  But I promise you I will haunt it!  I just hope it never changes, and remains forested forever with these huge pines and oaks.  Some people look at it and see money and I see an eco-system.

This round of sickness reminded me so much of when I had bronchitis right before I graduated High School, which I talked about in The healing power of music.  I have been working on a project where I was taking all my old CD’s, copying onto my computer, and then transferring them to my tablet and / or Jay’s phone.  Apparently I have 16 Jimmy Buffet albums.  For days, this is all I could do.  It brought back lots of memories.  I cried when I heard Keith Whitley sing, thinking of how we lost him too soon.  I still remember where I was when I heard he was dead.  For some of my generation they lamented the loss of Kurt Cobain, for me it was Keith Whitley.

When I got to some of my country classics and my soul music, I thought about my Dad.  When I would get sick, I would sleep on the couch, with my little vaporizer and Mom would tend me.  Dad would come in drunk as Cooter Brown, and he would teach me about music.  He would play Tanya Tuckers TNT album.  The album folded out and on the inside was this picture of her in bright red body suit.  Then he would pull out his Barbara Mandrel albums.  Mom despised her, something about she was in a car wreck and sued the family of the man who hit her, even though he died and she was rich.  Then Dad would pick up his Barbara Streisand albums and look at them longingly.  He would say, “I love her, but I hate her politics.”  She is a liberal Democrat, Daddy is a died in the wool conservative Republican.   He would inevitable put the record down and not play it.  He would talk about The Temps and The Tops and said he used to argue with Uncle Andy over who was better.  He taught me to love soul music and really all music, no matter the ethnicity. 

My mom loves music too, but with her it was only Rock and Roll and Pop; Elton John, The Beatles, Paul McCartney, Wings, Joe Stampley and The Uniques, and James Taylor.  I had to fight her to able to listen to country music.  “Why do you want to listen to people sing threw their nose?!”  she would say.  We would be riding along in the car and she would ask me who was playing.  Then she would snap her fingers and say, “You ought to know it when it starts!”  But with Dad, he taught me, the world was my musical oyster.

Something else has happened in the last few weeks that I want to share with you.  A friend of mine in middle school I have talked in Friends, named Stacy, lost her baby brother Sammy to suicide. Now those of you who are following along, know I have struggled with suicidal tendencies throughout my life.  But the shock of what this has done to someone so dear to me, and her family, has made me see what damage I would do to my family should I chose to do this.  Also watching Jay struggle this week with those heavy boards has made me realize, if I should leave him, there would be no one to help him with projects.  He would have to struggle to tend to this house, this farm, and these kids, by himself.  I just can’t do that to him.  It’s not fair.  I feel this round of Bronchitis might have just cured me of this tendency.

 As much as I hem and I haw that I don’t do enough around this house, cause I can still look around and see cobwebs and a toilet I need to attack with a toothbrush.  I realize this week just how much I do do, that I have always done, and how much more I have started doing since I got on my new meds.  How much I grieved, not being able to type or even having the energy to pick up pen and paper and write to you.  I still have so many stories left to tell you.  I have to tell you about The Brett Incident, and going to USL, and lots of other stories and I have to finish my books.  I really realized this week how much y’all would miss me, and how much I would miss this life.  What the dead always tell me is how much they miss being alive.  How frustrating it would be to me, to be on the other side and not be able to bring Jay a glass of tea when he his hot, or find his hammer when he has lost it again.  How sad indeed. 

Ilsa

 

 

Momma Muriel's

Before we left Ebarb we acquired two more souls to our tribe.  A spunky, 1 ½ year old, little tan Chihuahua we named Sophia, after the Goddess of wisdom.  Sophia had been stolen by some kids living in the Zwolle projects.  They could not bring her inside, so they kept her tied up outside and feed her when they could.  A friend’s son had acquired her after that.  I begged him to let me have her.  He finally relented.  Jay was so excited to finally have a Chihuahua in his life again. 

About the same time, I was visiting with some friends who were also in the Humane Society when I meet the sweetest little black and tan girl.  She was about 4 weeks old at that time.  They had found her and a brother at a dumpster outside of Fisher, Louisiana.  Oh she was so tiny back then!  I kept coming over to visit this little one I was just sure was going to be a Dachshund.  My follower rescuers told me they were going to put her down because they thought she was anti-social.  I said “Give her to me.  Let my pack work with her.”  We convinced Jay and I took her home at 8 weeks old.  We named her Princess.  Our royal court was now complete.  She told me that she had seen her mother killed in front of her and did not want to live.  It took a while of being with my fur children, but she eventually came around.   As to her breed, well a year and a half after getting her, we finally came to the conclusion she was in fact half Rottweiler and half Lab..  Laugh all you want.  She still thinks she’s a Dachshund.  I’ve never really had to worry about her getting on the counters and she will hide from bigger dogs. 

Princess is very special.  I don’t know that she is anti-social, but I have often said that if she was human she would be autistic.  She does really well, but she has her limits.  When there are too many people in the house, or it is too loud she will go and hide.  And of course she also does this with fireworks and thunderstorms. 

So the seven of us, Jay, me, Precious, Pumpkin, Prince, Sophia and Princess all prepared to get ready to move.  We had to find someone who could move our little trailer before the winter and the wet weather came.  If we waited too long it would be too wet to move us, and we would have to wait till spring.  I immediately began to make phone calls and finally found someone to move our trailer to Momma Muriel’s property.  In the mid part of October 2005 we left Ebarb, our painful history behind and headed home.

We all stayed with Momma Muriel while we got everything hooked up, all of us but Princess.  She went to live with my parents until we had everything hooked up.  She was just too big with all of us in such a small house.  It took me a few weeks of work to learn the dance to get back into our house.  First we had to dig the test pits to find out if we needed a septic system, to get the 911 number, to get the water turned on, to get the electricity turned on, and to finally get the septic system, which my parents paid for.  Nowhere was all this written down.  I only found this out by trial and error, and lots and lots of phone calls.  My goal was to have the lights on in the house by Halloween, but I didn’t make it.  It took us about 3 weeks to get everything turned on.  We got in our house about the second week in November.

Jay and I were overjoyed to be somewhere we were wanted.  Ebarb was a very closed community.  They are very distrustful of outsiders.  If you were not related or at least Catholic, they did not want you.  We made very few friends while we lived there.  It was a hard community to get into.  I had made one good friend down there.  We were tight until one day, while I was asleep on her couch, her husband decided he wanted to fondle me.  When I told her she said, “Oh he’s just drunk.  He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”  Needless to say I was glad to be away from him.

We had two and a half wonderful years out here with Momma Muriel.  She would often ask me what I wanted when she died, her jewelry, stuff in her house, her land.  I told her, “I just want more time with you, and I would really like this piece of land so we don’t have to move after you are gone.”  She lived her life, we lived ours and we met in the middle often for breakfast or dinner. 

From the time that Momma Muriel went on dialysis she knew that she was living on borrowed time. She had her will, her do not resuscitate (DNR) order, and her power of attorney all in order. She had even written her own obituary.  We had several close calls in the short time we were together, a few months before her death she had developed a bleeding ulcer.  As I drove her to the hospital we talked at length about how she wanted her funeral, what to dress her in, where to bury her, and who she wanted to do her service.  I am very grateful I had that conversation with her, because when the time came I knew what to do and where everything was.

She and I talked about death frequently.   She would have a bad day and say, “Ah!  I ain’t worth killing!  You ought to just take me out back and shoot me!  I’m going to get off this old dialysis and just die!”

I would tell her, “Before you do that, give me a couple of weeks to plan you a going away party.  We’ll have a big crawfish boil and invite all your family to say goodbye.  Then you get off dialysis and we know that you will have two weeks to live.”

She’d get this kind of pissed look on her face and say, “Oh hell Ilsa I was only kidding!”  and she would go right back to what she had been doing before.

Momma Muriel knew that I was pagan and she didn’t care. She still loved me anyways and never tried to convert me. I talked with her at length about what I thought would happen to her when she died.  I told her that in many cases I had heard of people dreaming or seeing their dead relatives just prior to their death.  I believe it is the dead’s way of helping us prepare for the next life.  I also told her that when she died she would probable see a light.  In the light were all of her family, and that she was to go towards it. I told her heaven is a bigger place then we think of.   I feel that each religion has their own version of the heavens and they all touch.  That travel between each was possible and I would see her again.  I then told her my belief that after she had been in the heavens for some time, and she was ready, she would be given the opportunity to return to earth, to be reincarnated. 

One day we had just come back from grocery shopping and were going in the house.  She began to tell me that the night before she had dreamed her Mom and her sister were in the bed with her, talking to her.  I knew she never dreamed of her dead family members.  I knew it was an omen.  They were preparing her.

Three weeks later on June 21^st, 2008 Momma Muriel fell and cracked her pelvis.  She lasted 13 days in the hospital, passing her 81^st birthday while there.  After she went in the hospital she became septic and developed a bowl obstruction.  She had surgery, but her body was just to week from all of that and her failed kidneys to continue.  The Dr’s told us that if she lived she would have to spend the rest of her life in a nursing home.  I knew that she would hate that. Her independence was everything to her.  It always had been.   She died on Friday July 4^th, 2008 at noon.  We like to say she went out with a bang. 

I got the call to come to the hospital.  That she was close to death and they were calling the family in to say goodbye.  I floored it.  I drove as fast as I could.  As I rode in the elevator up to her room, I knew she was dead.  When I arrived she had died about 5 minutes before.  It was like all the air was sucked out of me.  But I knew I had to retain my composure, I had to be strong for Jay.  He had arrived just in time.  She had turned towards him, smiled, winked at him and then peacefully passed away.  His face was the last thing she ever saw.  Jay thinks she stayed alive until he could get there. 

They ushered us out of the room so that they could disconnect her from her IV’s and other tubes.  While they did that I tried desperately to reach her priest to come to the hospital.  Turns out he was outside mowing and did not come back in until that evening.  The hospital called the chaplain on duty to come and pray with us: Jay and I, my parents, and Jay’s parents.  As we prayed I begin to hear my name being called loudly in my head. 

“Ilsa!  Ilsa!  Turn around!  What the hell is going on??”  I knew the voice, it was Momma Muriel.  I smiled politely, prayed with them and then after a few minutes of everyone saying their goodbyes I asked for Jay and I to be alone with her body.  Jay was confused but by now had learned to follow my lead in these things. I closed the door and turned to look in the corner of the room where I felt there was energy.  With my third eye I could see her energy in dazzling ribbons of white and gold. 

“Ilsa!  What the hell is going on?”  she said

“Momma Muriel, I’m sorry, you are dead.”

“Oh well why the hell didn’t anyone tell me that?” she said

I explained that she should see a light in just a bit, and when she did she should go towards it. I told her I would stay with her until she did.  It took a few minutes but I soon felt a portal open and she went through it. I collapsed into tears and refused to leave her body.  I didn’t want anyone to mess with her or be mean to her.  We had basically been her care takes and advocates for the last 3 years.  It’s hard to give up that role.  Jay convinced me I must be hungry and to come to have something to eat with him.  Momma Muriel would not want me lose my strength.  I agreed and left her body. 

Forgive me as I do not remember everything that happened that weekend.  She died on a Friday and we had her wake on a Monday.  I don’t remember if her presence stayed with me or not. I called several of my pagan friends to come to the wake and be with me for comfort.   I do know that once I got to her wake she began talking just as loud as she did in the hospital.  It was a constant stream of, “Oh I haven’t seen her in years.  And what the hell is she doing here.  Or Oh I never could stand her.”  I finally had to walk into the bathroom and tell her that she was going to have to shut up and let me do this, or I was not going to make it thru.  That there would be time for a mental breakdown later.  I remember going back in the little room where her body was and receiving guests while holding my friends hands and just shaking.   We buried her on a Tuesday in accordance with her wishes and the customs of her church.  It was one of the worst days of my life.

I kind of lost it after Momma Muriel died.  One of the only people who had ever given me unconditional love, and was my best friend was gone.  I felt I had lost Oma all over again.  I don’t remember much of that time.  I stayed in bed a lot.  I felt I had lost my reason for being, my compass in life.  She remains one of the coolest people I have ever known. 

Ilsa

Novelle

My Mother remarried when I was 6 to a wonderful, loving, kind, and jolly man named Jef. My biological father, Beau, had left my mother when I was 2, while she was ill and in the hospital recovering from brain surgery. 

The night I met Jef, a.k.a. Daddy, was very unusual.  It is one of the very few times I have heard the Gods voice outside my body.  I was sitting behind my mom, combing her hair, at her then boyfriend’s house.  Daddy had just come in and was sitting down drinking a beer.  I was looking at him, when the room stopped, and time stood still.  I heard a woman’s voice say, “This will be your father for the rest of your life.” And then everything just clicked right back in.  I figured well, I guess she must be right.  I walked right over to him and said, “I’m Ilsa.  I’m 6 years old.  Can I comb your hair?”  He said yes and I jumped up in his lap.  Don’t ask I was into hair at that age.  I have no idea why. 

Daddy tells the story that he had met mom at the Dairy Queen in Logansport.  She and I had walked in one day and he was sitting with his buddy, who turned out to be a mutual friend.  The friend introduced them.  Daddy says, “I thought, now who is that beautiful woman in those maroon jeans and with that cute little girl.”  He could not stop thinking about her.  He found out she was dating a friend of his and decided to pay him a visit, with the express thought of stealing her away from him.  It worked.  They met and married within 6 weeks.  They’ve been married for 30 plus years now. 

I immediately began to call him Daddy.  I was instantly accepted into the family as one of theirs, accept by Novelle.  She was a mean and evil woman.  She always saw me as a step-grandchild, even after being legal adopted by Daddy, having my name changed, and beginning to study Daddy’s family’s genealogy.  Nothing I could ever do for her ever pleased her.  She always saw me as lesser than. Things would just be going along fine, and I guess she felt she needed to knock me down a rung, and then she would start her shit. 

She would berate me on a regular and public basis.  I remember many, many family dinners after church where she would sit and tell me how fat I was, and was I going to eat all my food.  NO ONE stood up for me.  Not my parents, my cousins, my aunts or my uncles, none of them.  I was forbidden to defend myself or say anything to her by my parents.  In fact this treatment from her continued until my teens, where I would drive to family functions in my car.  If she insulted me, I would quietly pick up my plate, place it beside the sink, and leave. She never did this to her other grandchildren, some who were bigger than me.  I believe she did this because I was her step-grandchild, and she always, until the day she died, saw me as such.  I am still listed in the family bible as a step-grandchild. 

The other thing she loved to do at dinner was ask me when the last time I saw my father was.  I responded with, “He’s sitting at the end of the table.”

“No I mean the real one.” She said coyly.

Now I had not seen Beau, my biological father since shortly after my 6^th birthday.  And she knows this, she knows this, but she just has to stick the knife in and twist it to get a rise out of me.  With no one to stop her, and being forbidden to say anything to her, I just had to sit there and take it.  I would go home and be in tears, just so upset.  I would tell my parents and they would say, “She is your Nanny.  You have to love her!”  I’d already been down this road with Grandpa.

This all comes to a head in August of 2002.  I am drinking coffee with the old men down in Kickapoo, trying to get inspiration for my upcoming “Prodigal Daughter” article, I was writing at the time in the local paper.  She walks in. I run up to her, calling her name.  I say come over and meet my friends.  She is furious with me.  She says, “you need to come away with me now!”

“Why?”

“You need to come away with me now!  You don’t disturb men while they are working!”

I am confused.  They are just drinking coffee.  I kind of dismiss her words, and start introducing her.  When I say, “Y’all this is Novelle, my grandmother.” 

She says, “Hump!  I’m not her Grandmother!  She’s Jef’s adopted daughter!”

I am in shock.  It’s been twenty years since my parents married.  Most of the men in that room did not know I’m not Jef’s.  She does this to me in front of a District Judge, the Sheriff, and several Police Jury Members.  I am public humiliated and disowned.  I run crying to the bathroom. Eventually I get in my car and drive, crying, 15 miles to where Maddie is working.  I collapse in her arms a crying, sobbing mess.  I had nobody else.  I had not met Jay yet and my parents are working in Oklahoma.  I was just devastated.

Now you have to understand I come from a very small community.  I have been told all my life that my biological father and his family are nothing but white trash, nasty people, and don’t care for me.  Jef’s family is well respected, has connections, and at one time long ago had money.  At this point in my life I have tried to down play my biology, at times wishing I could rip out my biological fathers brown eyes and change them for Jef’s blue ones.  Wishing to change my very DNA and not be Beau’s daughter.  But his damn brown eyes keep staring back at me from the mirror. The secret, of who I really was, that I had been trying to keep under wraps for many years was blown apart by a woman who said she loved me. From that day forward I never called her “Nanny” again.  She lost that right.  Even now, years after her death, I still call her Novelle. 

But I one upped her.  She tells all of Kickapoo who I really am, fine, I go on and tell the whole parish.  My “Prodigal Daughter” article is due.  Late that night I write it and the opening words are, “I have been living a lie.  I am not who I claim to be.”  I go on to detail who my birth father is, how he left, the fact he has had no contact with me, and how Jef has been the only father I have ever know.  I finish and pick up the phone and call Daddy.  It’s the middle of the night.  He steps outside the trailer for a cigarette and to listen.  When I am done, there are tears in his eyes and you can hear over the phone he is choked up.  I later frame it and hang it in his bedroom.  When the article goes to copy, I lay the paper across Novelle’s car.  Checkmate.

I have a few more contacts with her.  I cuss her out one day not long after the article comes out and tell her she is lucky to have a granddaughter like me, who loves her, who cares about recording the family’s history.  She should count her lucky stars I have had not illegitimate children or been on drugs, as that might disgrace the family.  She should be lucky that the only thing she can find wrong with me is that I am drinking coffee with the old men.

Once Christmas I go to her house to get my present.  My parents are desperate to get me to see her, and want me to forgive her.  Momma Muriel and Jay are waiting there at my parent’s house when I return.  I burst into tears and weep for a long time with my head in Momma Muriel’s lap.  I am inconsolable. 

The last time I see her, she is giving away some of her things. Dad goes with me. I go in and get her pictures that are in her trunk.  You know the old ones, the dear ones.  I also get the recipes that are in the little green box she keeps on the counter.  As I am leaving she says, “You know I love you Ilsa.”  I tell her, “save that shit for someone who believes it.”

She dies in October of 2008. I start singing, “Ding dong the witch is dead!  The Witch is dead!” My hatred for her is still so strong I tell my best friend, “You best come with me so I don’t spit in this bitch’s coffin!”  Thankfully she comes with me and I restrain myself. 

There is however a strange post script to this story.  For years I have refused to put her, or my grandfather for that matter, on my altar, even though her husband, her son and lots of her family are on there.  I refuse to work with someone that I know was a horrible person and I did not like in this life.  I felt for a long time that Novelle was in Purgatory.  That she was learning what an awful person she had been to some people.  Now she was not just evil to me.  I remember one day sitting at her table and she told me, “I’m trying to break up your Uncle’s marriage so he will go back and marry his first wife.”  He was on wife number three.  WHAT!  What kind of crazy, manipulative person does that!  And to her own kid!

I had a dream about her, a vision more like.  She came to me and wanted to tell me how sorry she was for the way that she had treated me in this life.  She said, “I am sorry I did not understand.  I did not understand what kind of grandmother you needed me to be.”  And then she sat down and read me a story.  Something she had never done with me as a child.  I have forgiven her, in a way.  I feel she has moved on and is no longer in Purgatory. 

Ilsa