I don’t feel relief.  I don’t know what I feel.

No, I feel mixed up.  I’m mad at Mom for giving up on Daddy.  I’m mad because I don’t understand why Daddy can’t stop drinking.  I’m mad at Donna because she feels relief, and not anger, like me.  I’m mad at myself because I don’t feel relief, like my sister.  I’m mad because Donna asks a dumb question.  Everything in this world is stupid, stupid, stupid.

“No, Donna, we’re moving to our own apartment,” said Mom.

It is as simple as that.

For the first time, the garden is ugly.  On the outside of the garden, I look in at the autumn decay of plant life, as they wither and die, turn in for the winter, the last of their old life dusts down to the dirt of dear, sweet, Jesus’ earth.

“The Stamford Advocate newspaper, October 18, 1968…Also, arrested was Joseph Bankowski, 41, of 144 Jefferson St. on charges of non-support.  The complaint was authorized by his wife and the warrant was signed by Judge Joseph J. Chernauskas.”

I am 9 years old.

Mom takes my sisters and me for a walk when we visit at Nanny’s.  This is unusual.  Mom doesn’t spend much time in the yard with us.  We’re shooed out the door to play as she visits Nanny, Aunt LaLa, and, as Mom says, “any Tom, Dick, or Harry,” that happens to stop by.  It’s okay with us.  We win the yard.

This time, with Mom, we walk along the grass that surrounds the outside of Uncle Pippi’s garden, along the gray-weathered, split rail log fence and the paved road.  The garden is on a plot of land like an island, surrounded on all sides by roads.  We follow Mom in a single row.

“Girls, your Daddy and I are getting divorced.  We won’t be living with him anymore,” said Mom.

I pull a piece of grass out by the roots and stick it between my teeth, instead of biting my fingernails for once.  It twitches nervously, shivers, in my mouth.  My fingernails, bitten to the quick as of late, sting from a medicine that garishly bleeds, a red stain circles each nail.

I wonder if Nanny and Aunt LaLa are watching us from the house across the street.  The thought bothers me.  I don’t like to be looked at or have attention turned to me.  I hate the idea that they might be looking at me, feeling sorry for me and my sisters.

“Are we going to live at Nanny’s?” asks Donna.  Will we live at this safe home in Darien?  She is relieved that we are finally leaving Daddy.

I don’t feel relief.  I don’t know what I feel.

“No, Donna, we’re moving to our own apartment,” said Mom.

It is as simple as that.

On the outside of the garden, I look in at the autumn decay of plant life as they wither and die, turn in for the winter, the last of their old life dusts down to the dirt of dear, sweet, Jesus’ earth.

We are young girls, my three sisters and me.

We cover Nanny’s neighborhood, from her front and back yards, Grandpa’s kitchen garden, the back lot, the triangular plot of Uncle Pippi’s garden, Great-Aunt Lizzie’s yard across the street, over to Aunt Matheline’s yard around the corner, to a small woods that hides a stone foundation of an ancient wine cellar on Gardiner Street.

We branch out, as we can’t depend on Mom for rides, and walk to the center of town to go to the library, or to window-shop at Goodwives Shopping Center.  We walk to Weed Beach, head to the back beach, curse at the sharp rocks that hoard the sand, until our toes touch the cool, salty, water of Long Island Sound.  Sailboats drift out of Noroton Bay harbor, dot the horizon.

We ice skate on Tilley’s Pond and climb the waterfall of Stony Brook Park.  We cross through Frate’s Park, the field at Baker’s School, and spend a lot of time at McGuane Field, which we call the Baseball Field, across the street from our house.  Here, on the swingset, we swing long swings to lose long afternoons.

We trek down the longwinded stretch of West Avenue to Woodland Park, get lost in the forest, run in a field of wild grass, inspect fallen logs and tree limbs shorn from trunks by the wind.  We marvel at the skunk cabbage that grows in a swampy spot near the road, with its scrolled leaves and funny name.  We collect leaves, twigs, the yellow, tiny flowers of the Woodland Agrimony and the purple Dog Violet that peep out at us between tree roots that swell in the dirt of the moist woods.

We may not be able to enter the rich girls’ world, my sisters and me, in the 14.9 square miles of the town of Darien, however, we enter nature’s wonder, where we are not shunned.  The land in this town is part of me, and it’s a beautiful place, my Darien.

On this Easter morning,

there are things I want.

I want to heal my broken heart that wished, oh so hard, to take Mom, so sad and alone, from the nursing home.

I want to find the way out from under the smothering, heavy blanket, peek out at the edge, where the sun’s light shines bright in my eyes.

I want to let go of the fear of suffering that stands in the way of my calling to work for justice.

I want to be the good ground that Pippi’s love takes root in.

I want to give and not count the cost,

I want to run along the garden path to God, follow Jesus,

and arrive at Easter in the joy of the Holy Spirit.

Mom brings home a wooden yardstick from a headstone memorial company.  She went there with Aunt LaLa to choose a headstone for Nanny’s grave.  The yardstick is stamped Geno J. Lupinacci Memorials.  She keeps the yardstick in her closet and takes it with her when she moves from Noroton Avenue.

I don’t see the yardstick again until I come across it years later, when cleaning out her condominium as I move her to an assisted living facility.  I bring the yardstick home.  I remember Nanny’s death.  Mom measured time and now it’s my turn.

When I purchase Mom’s gravesite at Spring Grove Cemetery in Darien, the cemetery guy recommends that I go to Lupinacci’s for a headstone.  I don’t connect the name to the yardstick right away.  Of course, I don’t think about Geno.  I don’t meet him.  I meet his son, who is about my age.  Geno is dead.  He’s of Mom’s generation.

I meet a dead-end when it comes to designing Mom’s headstone.  I don’t want to do this.  I hate doing this.  I have to do this.  It is hard to measure time.  God is making me do this.  He is far from finished with me.

The same attorney is retained to help me with Mom’s estate a few years after Uncle Pippi’s will was contested after his death and that court case closed.  “Estate” is a grand word for a little nothing and it doesn’t fit this situation.  However, I need to use the sale proceeds from Mom’s little condo to partially pay for her assisted living expenses.  I want to do it the right way, the legal way, the honest way.  I can’t do it any other way, because that’s just me, and “estate” is the grand, technical, legal term that I’m forced to use.

After several meetings with the attorney, I shyly tell her my idea with Pippi’s story – my story – my book.  She encourages, then says that she will pray for me.

Just like that, God opens the door and pierces my soulful house.  God comes to me through the attorney, and as wacky as that sounds, thank you, dear, sweet Jesus.

She tells me that she likes the idea that I’m “going through the back door” to tell my story.  With the words “back door,” I imagine Aunt LaLa’s back door, the little slate porch, and the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times I’ve opened that door to enter the kitchen of Grandpa, Nanny, Uncle Pippi, and Aunt LaLa’s home, the porch just steps away from the lucky, four-leaf clovers hidden in the grass, and the cheerful zinnias that bob their heads hello.

“Hi, Aunt LaLa!”  If she’s not in the kitchen, my words zip, zip, zip through the house, to find their way to her.

“Hello Uncle Pippi,” I shyly say and he smiles at me.

The back door, back door, back door.  The back door that welcomes me, the one that’s always open, the one that is heaven-sent.

I get off Exit 10 on the I-95 thruway after I leave the attorney.  I haven’t been this way since I withdrew the court case because I couldn’t muster up my God-given strength to even look at Aunt LaLa’s house or Uncle Pippi’s garden.

I do it this time, take my time, drive slowly through the neighborhood.  It feels safe, as it always has.  Quiet roads, nothing much changed, many of the same, old homes of my childhood, the prettiness of it all, a nibble of kids play in a yard, a mom strolls a baby carriage, another collects envelopes from a mailbox that sits on a green pole.

I stop at the garden.  It’s messy.  Pippi would not be happy.  Someone has a garden here, however, he’s a sloppy gardener.  Haphazard tomatoes in uneven rows.  Short cornstalks grow along the barbed wire fence, their longing leaves try to escape.

When I visited Aunt LaLa at a nursing home a while ago, she told me that a cousin bartered with a landscaper, exchanging lawn cutting for use of the garden.

The hill where the house sits is overgrown with weeds.  A United States of America flag hangs flatly on the front door, the red and white stripes vertically down.  It is still.  It is lonely.

The house and the garden tell me to hurry, hurry, hurry.  Time is running out.

I rest my car at the stop sign directly across from the driveway of the house.  I see everything as it is, but feel everything as it had been so long ago.  The air exhausts and weighs me down.  As I drive past a cousin’s house a few blocks away, tears explode.

The house and the garden tell me to hurry, hurry, hurry.  Time is running out.  I must hurry, hurry, hurry, for Pippi and myself.

“You’re good at clamming, Jeanne.  You’re lucky,” said Mom.

I don’t feel lucky as my feet blindly search for clams in the muck in the water, the cool, blue water of Long Island Sound, at Pear Tree Point Beach in Darien.  Clamming is not the same without Daddy.  Life is not the same without Daddy.  The clams thunk instead of snap.  It’s a chore to lug the heavy, clam-filled basket to the beach blanket where Mom leisurely soaks up God’s summer sun.  It’s a chore, chore, chore, to clean the guts out of the clams after they cool from steaming open, their boiled flesh widly exposed in gray shells that are piled up in the pot on the stove.  Thunk, thunk, thunk, I go through life blindly.

My sisters and I sit on the hill in Nanny’s yard, spy on wild rabbits in Grandpa’s garden, as they munch the early seedlings while keeping a look-out for trouble about, pick yellow daffodils and white crocuses to clutch until they wilt, and watch Uncle Pippi push the seeder along the dirt, drop the seeds in his garden.  It’s Springtime.  We sit on the hill across the street from Uncle Pippi’s garden at the corner of Maple and Gardiner Streets.  He plants seeds a quarter inch or so deep in the ground and covers them with gray soil, presses down well so the seeds take.  He bends at the waist, legs spread widely apart, head bows religiously to the ground, wispy white hair circles his hard, chiseled cheeks.  I think of words from a religious song, “Inch by inch and row by row, God bless these seeds I sow.”  I pray to God to help the garden grow, yet, it seems with or without my prayers, the garden always gifts us with plenty.  Our silly chit-chat, mixed with brooding-hot-tempered, girly-gab rabbits on along the breeze, over to the garden, flows north along the I-95 highway and east towards Weed Beach, out over Long Island Sound to the Atlantic Ocean, to the winds that blow, and perhaps our voices rest on a foreign land, far, far, away, such as Korea.