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PipLove: A story of tortious interference with an inheritance

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Winter Prayer In Darien

            The mother of all snowflakes lands on my tongue.

            It’s cold joy.

            Grandpa waves hello from the kitchen window that overlooks the driveway at Nanny’s house, where I stand, as my sisters run about, snow-dusted-confectionary-sugared, in the fluttery snow.  I wave back to Grandpa, and push my hair away from my face with winter armor of a red, hand-me-down mitten.  I don’t know it today, but one day, Grandpa will be gone, and harsh tears will catch in my throat when I see his gray sweater lying alone on the chair by the window.

            No more waves from Grandpa.

            It’s winter in Darien.  I grab little sister Maria’s fake-fur-trimmed jacket hood, pull her along, and order Barb to follow our older sister Donna.  We run to the hill at the front yard, make snow-angels, our bodies crazily thrashing as we lie in the white snow. 

            I believe that God’s angels in heaven, in the winter sky, look at me.  My arms slide up-and-down to make angel wings.  I pump hard, wish hard to get rid of the defenseless fear that silences me.  I try not to be afraid and pray to Jesus to give me strength, just like Mom does. 

            I try hard to think of good things.  Christmas is almost here. 

            And with that day, Baby Jesus!  Baby Jesus!  Baby Jesus!

            On Christmas Day, I will put Baby Jesus in the crib in our Polish grandparents’ nativity manger, and think how God loved the world so much that he gave us his only Son, and, here, the Baby Jesus goes from my hand to his place of honor in a little wooden shed.

            Above us, as we lie in the snow, the dark vertical stripes of trunks of Great-Uncle Mike’s maple tree are leafless against the soft blue sky.

            As we run down the hill, four sets of angel prints of smothered wings trampled by four girls’ boot marks lay in the snow.

            I run along, place my red-mittened hand on the slate of the stone wall that Grandpa built, as I curve into the driveway.  Grandpa waves to me from the window.  Waving for me to come inside, come in, come in, come in.

            “Don’t you see, sisters?  Grandpa’s telling us to come inside.

            It’s winter in Darien.  I follow the slushy tracks of Donna’s white rubber boots as the four of us girls go inside, to Nanny’s warm, Christmas kitchen.  It is here where the burdens of life are flung out the back door, thrown out as far as can be.  It is here where Christmas is found, in the winter in Darien.  It is here where I feel that God will protect me from enemies.  Maybe Mom feels this way, too.

            In Nanny’s kitchen is where I pump my mind hard, make it push away thoughts – don’t want to think about the butcher knife weapon that wild Mom crazily thrashed at Drunk-Daddy last night, a mad-woman-as-protector, of my sisters and me.

            I don’t know that her defense attacks are over.  

            I don’t know that Mom will divorce Daddy.

            I don’t know it today, well, maybe I do, that my stubborn-self won’t accept change easily as I struggle, fight, cope, in an uncertain life without Daddy.

            Later, I am lost without Daddy. 

            Even with all of his faults, I miss Daddy.

            I pray and hope that God loves me and I hold onto this hope real tight, especially when I feel that no one else loves me.

            Eventually, I begin to believe that there’s not a battle in life that I’m left to fend for myself.  Dear, Sweet, Jesus is with me, fighting alongside.  He was always with me, in my Christmas prayers to give me strength.  Jesus gave me armor, for all kinds of battles, through winter prayer in Darien.


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WILD One Long Sentence For One Short Time

We are wild girls in our Seaside Avenue yard, with our fierce yells, pinching, hitting, pulling of hair, that intermingles with our belly-crawling, in-the-dirt, tangled play, as I boss my sisters and the girls next door, with my hands on my hips, ordering them that first we play dodgeball, then ring-a-levio, break into teams where we capture the enemy and put them in an old trailer with a hitch – that’s the jail – or tag, or kickball, and then we’ll swing on the neighbors’ swing and slide on the slide, and climb the old crabapple tree, and when we’re done with all of that, I’ll make them play ring-around-the-rosie for little Maria, until we fall down too pooped to do anything else, yet, out will come the colored construction paper, the ordering of collecting leaves, and showing Barb how to paste the leaves into a figure, with a leaf head, arms, body, legs, and don’t forget to draw a red-crayoned smiley face so you have something to smile back at, which only leads me to make a family of puppets out of cardboard, so I can put on a made-up puppet show, in-between telling them to shut up and listen until that’s over, and I’ve had enough and take some space to think, lean my cousin’s hand-me-down ten-speed bike up against the big oak tree, so I can climb up on it, thrilled by the ride down the slope of the yard on a bike way too big for me, until Mom comes outside and orders me off that bike – it’s way too big and I’ll break my neck – (soon she makes the bike disappear, like she did with our pet dog cat, and duck), but I don’t care, it’s freeing to glide, until I get scared and stop before I do break my neck, ignoring Mom as she tells all of us to be quiet and turns to the house again, leaves us in peace until our scratching, fighting, mixed-up running around leads Donna off to a corner of the yard to talk to herself, leads me to venture into another neighbor’s backyard, where I’m not allowed, to steal stalks of tart rhubarb, and it’s not that I even like the taste of it, I just want it, like I want a lot of things that I don’t have and I can’t get, however, it doesn’t matter, because I don’t care, a new dress doesn’t hide the wild girl that I am, the girl that’s growing up quick, learning the ropes, dealing with the crappy things in life, the things that twist my stomach, that make the fight or flight feeling juiced up in a second, and makes me think that our life’s going to be tough for awhile, maybe longer than awhile, which is confirmed as our wild girls’ fierce shouts in this short childhood time expel forward to the wilder teenage years and to the wild women we become.


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Because She Suffers, We Must Suffer

At Nanny’s house, Mom spends her time indoors, chats it up with Aunt LaLa, Nanny, and, more often than not, cousin Lucia, and Great-Aunt Lizzie, who trails whispery smoke from a waving cigarette as she walks across the lazy street from her home, up the path alongside Grandpa’s zinnia bed, her flowered housecoat hanging loosely on her soft, round form.

At the end of the summer, when I’m ten years old, Mom takes my sisters and me on a walk while we’re at Nanny’s.  This is kind of unusual, as Mom didn’t take many walks with her four girls.  Instead, she’s always eager to order us to run outside and play, just to get us out of the house.  I don’t mind so much ’cause then I don’t have to listen to her constant nagging.  I know Mom likes peace and quiet.  She’s said so many times.

“Those god-damn kids!” says Mom as we run outdoors, slamming the kitchen door behind us.

Mom was good at nagging about walks.  She rarely gave us rides, sometimes due to the break-down of our car, sometimes not.  We walked to school, from school, to and from church, the park, the beach, the grocery store.

“When I was a kid, I walked everywhere,” she said.

Never mind if you just didn’t feel like walking sometimes.              

Her tone suggests that because she suffers, we must suffer.  So, since she walked, we walked.

This particular day, on a day where you wished the sun felt warmer on your skin, Mom led the way, Indian single-file style, where we followed her on the unmown grassy area that surrounds Uncle Pippi’s garden, along the gray-weathered split rail log fence and the paved roads.  The garden, across the street from Nanny’s house, is on an island-shaped plot of land, surrounded by three roads (the neighborhood was chopped up by the addition of the I-95 Turnpike in the 1950s, cutting off Linden Avenue along one side of the island and splitting the neighborhood of Italian immigrants).  

Uncle Pippi’s end-of-summer garden was almost shut down, the last of the vegetables harvested, seeds stored in a cool, dry place in the garage, garden plants cut to the soil or pulled up entirely by roots, and the compost pile piled up with garden waste.  Plants that showed just a hint of disease were thrown away so as not to contaminate next year’s crop.  A few stragglers of decayed plants will be pulled out tomorrow, and Uncle Pippi’s last chore is to clean and store the tools – the hoe, the rake, the wheelbarrow, the seeder, that rest against a stone wall.  The desolate death of the garden darkens my soul.                 

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

I pull a long piece of wild, dead grass out by its roots and stick it in between my teeth.  It twitches nervously, shivers in my mouth.  I stare at the last of the garden and wonder if Nanny is watching us from the livingroom window in her house across the street.  I can’t look at the house.  I don’t want to see Nanny looking at us.  At me.

“Are we going to live at Nanny’s?” asks Donna, relief in her face, round eyes wondering. 

She is glad that we are finally leaving Daddy.

Me, not so much. 

It might as well be the death of Daddy.  What’s to happen to us?  To me?  My older sister’s words are cold comfort for my breaking heart.

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

It was as simple as that.  On the outside of the garden, looking in, the end-of-summer decay of garden plants, as they wither and dry, turning in for the winter, the last of their old life dusting down to the dirt of Dear, Sweet, Jesus’ earth.

Copyright © Jean DeVito, September, 2024.  All rights reserved.