I was sad to learn about Terri Nida’s passing on January 12, 2025. Terri was a dear friend, an advocate, and a dedicated writer. My tribute to her is here. The sadness, of course, is for myself and for Terri’s family and friends who love her. But Terri was at peace and ready to sail on.

“Sail on, silver girl
Sail on by
Your time has come to shine
All your dreams are on their way
See how they shine”

“Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Simon & Garfunkel

                  —KAW

Peanut Butter Cups (as it originally appeared in TVBR Weekly Reader on June 24, 2024)

My father shuffles into my room at the nursing home every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

“Hello, dear!” he says in his raspy, old-man voice. He’s always cheerful despite having to visit his daughter in a facility for people who cannot take care of themselves. I turn my head as far as I can in his direction. My entire body feels encased in concrete.

“Hi, Dad!” I say with all the cheer I can muster.

He walks toward me with a hobble and a slight hunch in his back. His pants sag at the waist, but he has them cinched tight with an old belt he used to wear in the Navy. He’s armed with his usual bag of peanut butter cups.

“I've had this belt for over fifty years,” he tells me with pride. “I weighed 110 pounds when I went into the service and this belt was issued to me. Now, it fits again!”

He reaches down and puts his thumb between his belt and his pants. He tugs at the belt to show how it snugly fits around his waist. He looks at me with excited, arched eyebrows flecked with dandruff. I can’t help but smile.

My dad lost more than thirty pounds when my neck was broken a few years back. He was absolutely delighted to be able to use that belt for a second time. I, on the other hand, was deeply saddened that my injury was the cause of his weight loss.

I know it must be so hard for him to visit me in a place like this. He in his eighties, and I in my fifties; our roles should be reversed. I think we both always assumed that when he reached an age where he could no longer care for himself, I would move into his house and provide for his needs. Now everything feels jumbled up. I wonder if he lays in bed at night and asks God, or the air, or the spirit of my deceased mother, why this has happened to his daughter.

Before my body became paralyzed, I was such a go-getter and fiercely independent. He always expressed how proud he was of me working as a professional in several well-known companies. He and my mom graduated from high school, but college was out of the question. Back in their day, secondary education was only accessible to the rich, so he was wowed by my accomplishments, even though I didn’t think they were that amazing.

Now I have days when I wonder what reasons my dad has to be proud of me. I live in a place that often smells like poop and pee and seems to be a holding tank for the elderly waiting to die. We often have “yellers” on the hall who cry out for help day and night, and despondent wanderers, who walk into other residents’ rooms looking for their long-departed spouses.

On top of that, I am completely dependent on others. I need them to bathe and feed me and make sure I get my 20+ medications each day to keep me functioning more comfortably.

My urine flows out of an opening in my abdomen. My feces are expelled at night after I receive a suppository, a laxative, and several stool softeners. Assigned to a shared room, I’m always embarrassed by the stench as I wait for my nursing aide to come and change my diaper and spray air freshener to put my roommate out of her misery. I miss the days when I could withstand nature’s calls until what felt like a more convenient time.

I look over at my dad. We catch eyes. I breathe a sigh of resignation.

“Dad, you don’t have to come here three times a week. I know that puts a lot of burden on you, and it must be depressing.”

My dad gets out of the chair, walks over to my bed, and pushes the hair off my forehead. He tenderly kisses me there.

“I’m your father, and this is my job. I happen to like my job,” he says.

“Shall we enjoy some peanut butter cups?”

With trembling, age-spotted hands, he unwraps the candy, breaks it in half, and gently places it in my mouth.

Terri Nida is currently working on her memoirs, and is now reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp, and The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr, all to strengthen her writing. Terri’s blog can be found here.

This edition of “A Pinch of Herbs” features botanical spookiness that meshes with the theme of our soon-to-be-distributed “Ghosts” issue. Highlights include the most famous plants and herbs associated with the history of Old World witchcraft, most notably those thought to comprise witches’ Flying Ointment—a concoction that allegedly allowed them magical flight upon broomsticks. Join us for a tour of some of the creepiest plants . . . that might have ended up in a witch’s cauldron.

A Halloween witch might grow in her garden herbs common to both cooking and healing. But what else might she grow? A witch might grow mandrakes, belladonna, wormwood, henbane, hemlock, wolfsbane, and datura. Many of these come down to us in historical accounts as ingredients for the infamous Flying Ointment, said to enable witches to fly on brooms to midnight ceremonies. Not every account lists all of these botanicals all together, all the time. But they all are firmly on the Poison Path, one name for the study of the use of baneful herbs in sorcery.

The image of the archetypal Witch has shifted, and our most solid associations arguably come from witchcraft panics that shaped European history. (Although other cultures around the world have their own indigenous folk healing practices and beliefs in magic, and their own botanicals, our focus here is limited to what is perhaps the most widely recognized archetype, the witch has outlasted European history). Earliest prehistory in Europe had shamans, both male and female. Today, the archetypal Witch is still with us—some practitioners of nature-based neo-pagan religions, such as Wicca, call themselves witches. On television in recent decades, the (female) witch has been either a teen or an utterly charming not-quite-ordinary housewife. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the children’s literature industry heavily marketed richly illustrated retellings of old stories, the witch was luring Hansel and Gretel with candy or was the Wicked Queen; during that time her looks were also softened and prettied for Halloween greeting cards.

But centuries earlier, supposed witches gained a reputation as companions of demons. This characterization of witches, leading to witchcraft panics, began as early as the late medieval period and lasted until part of the eighteenth century; in America, the much-studied events at Salem arose from this characterization. Here, the witch was believed to be real—and a servant of Satan, with her powers acquired through pacts with demons. The witch was malevolent, sometimes a poisoner, and always pursuing her midnight rides to her Witches Sabbath.

“The modern European concept of the witch as a woman involved with demons was cemented in the Renaissance, when the majority of witch trials were directed at women. Poor, often single, women were vulnerable to accusations from neighbors seeking supernatural explanations for misfortune,” contributing scholars write in A History of Magic, Witchcraft & The Occult (DK, 2020).

As the editor of The Penguin Book of Witches (Penguin Classics, 2014), which contains accounts of accused witches from medieval Europe through eighteenth-century America, professor of history and novelist Katherine Howe elaborates on this point. “Witchcraft was a legitimate, but dangerous, category for explaining reality. Witchcraft intersected, contained, and sometimes overwrote other important social questions—most notably of gender, class, inequality, and religion.”

The witch’s image as a demonic individual utilizing poisonous plants to fly on her broom to her rituals was solidified in the Renaissance and carried over into England’s New World colonies. William Perkins, a Puritan cleric, wrote Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft in 1608, and this one work “did much to introduce such European ideas [of witches as helpers of Satan and women as weak, easily influenced by evil] to England and North America,” according to A History of Magic.

The garden would have been the place where the witch grew her noxious night-mischief weeds, alongside benign, ordinary herbs and vegetables. The garden was the literal, visible intersection of herbs’ powers to heal as well as harm. Cunning folk were local people, usually women, who used their knowledge of herbs and plants to heal their neighbors, often for a small fee or a fair exchange. A History of Magic asserts that they often used spoken-word charms that drew on Christian scripture, and used their knowledge of plants to prepare herbal draughts, tinctures, poultices, infusions, and tisanes. They were generally left alone to practice, but sometimes unfortunately incurred the wrath of the community if there were livestock deaths, sick children, or crop failures.

But whatever guise she wears, the archetypal Witch has never quite escaped insinuations of sexually-charged night-flying and sacrificial ceremonies, courtesy of Flying Ointment; but what was in this notorious salve? The Early Modern period of Europe (roughly 1453-1798) is when the alleged recipes were first recorded by earnest students of the occult. (John Dee and Francis Bacon, courtiers to Elizabeth I, were obsessed with magic and alchemy; Dee was considered a wizard. James I, who ruled after her, also had a court full of occult dabblers. Witchcraft and magic were considered so real in England that he wrote a tract against it called Demonology.)

Earlier recipes do exist; for example, one written in 1267—firmly medieval—by Theodric of Cervia contained “henbane, mandrake, hemlock, lettuce, opium, ivy, climbing ivy, lapathum, juice of unripe mulberry, and spurge flax. The resultant ointment was to be soaked into a sponge and inhaled.” Francis Bacon’s seventeenth-century ingredient list for Flying Ointment was particularly gruesome: “the fat of children digged out their graves, of juices of smallage, wolf-bane and cinquefoil, mingled with the meal of fine wheat.” Trying to piece the puzzle together, Scientific Inquirer noted importantly in a 2019 article that recipes for Flying Ointment after Theodric’s included human remains or blood. The pattern through history emerges, clear that the archetype of the witch became one who made blood sacrifices, firmly in satanic thrall. The article, “Halloween Science: Breaking Down Witches Flying Ointment One Ingredient at a Time,” charts next a recipe from 1428. It listed “bat blood, vulture fat, and the blood of a newborn baby. Eight years later, Johannes Nider wrote in the Formicarius that boiled, unbaptized babies were the central ingredient.” And in 1584, A Discoverie of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot also chillingly mentions “the fat of young children”—along with aconite and soot.

While these recipes for Flying Ointment are particularly disturbing, some of the most violent persecution of alleged witches surged in the fifteenth century. Europe was waging general war on heresy while printed literature detailed lurid assurances that witches were demons’ helpers. No better excuse to put to death alleged witches than for rumor of human sacrifice. “From the 14th to the 18th centuries, around 50,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe and North America, some four fifths of whom were women. The most extreme purges took place in the late 16th and early 17th centuries in Europe,” partly due to passage of laws in many countries, according to A History of Magic.

“In addition to the profane, witches’ flying ointments called for a host of powerful and often poisonous plants,” the Scientific Inquirer article noted. No recorded recipe for Flying Ointment contained all of these at once, but many were often included. Flying Ointment was said to be rubbed by witches under their arms, between their thighs, and in the groin area, and they then mounted their brooms and flew to do the devil’s work.

Indeed, during the witchcraft panic in Salem, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1692, “riding on a pole” was part of the evidence given, as were assertions that the devil shapeshifted into animals; the devil bodily brought witches to a field; the devil coaxed witches to sign his book and to torment specific townsfolk. The use of poppets came up in evidence, as did invisible fingers pinching, invisible pins pricking, unexplainable convulsions, conversations with the devil about fine clothing and “pretty things,” and at one moment in testimony, a Witches Sabbath complete with sacrament—“red bread and red wine.” The Penguin Book of Witches contains some of these details in testimonies from the Salem trials.  Several of the women implicated named other women involved, and of course, young Betty Parris and Abigail Williams were at the forefront of events. In all, nineteen people were executed out of the more than 200 ultimately accused.

Flying Ointment, it seems, remains potent in the popular imagination. Even today, scholars debate whether any accounts of Flying Ointment found anywhere, or of witches flying, period, points to actual physical flight or rather to a dream state or an altered state of mind. Conflating it all, practitioners of modern religions that use witchcraft or magic even sell “Dream Ointment” or “Flying Ointment” online with various ingredients, stating they can help with lucid dreaming but noting clearly that mucous membranes are not to be anointed with the stuff.

Here is a primer of some of the most famous herbs associated with magic, many of them likely contenders for inclusion in Flying Ointment. A proviso: for entertainment purposes only. Do not ingest. Do not attempt to recreate. (For scholars, or for those who are just morbidly curious, there is a Poison Garden in Alnwick, England, which contains many of these plants, and more. You may take guided tours.)

Mandrake root (Mandragora): Mandrake was often listed as an ingredient in witches’ Flying Ointment. And, of all the herbs on this list, medieval and early modern Europeans feared the mandrake root most especially. Legend was that the plant’s forked roots made a homunculus, a tiny man; when pulled up, the roots would emit an earsplitting, fatal scream. It was said dogs were tied to the leaves, baited with meat or other tasty things, and when they lunged for the treats they pulled up the root, were subjected to the screams, and dropped dead. One medieval experiment may prove to the contrary: mandrake roots were pulled up by a dog in an experiment by Spanish Muslim medieval herbalist Ibn al Baitar—the dog lived, according to “The Plant that Can Kill and Cure,” a BBC News Magazine report from 2016.

Wolfsbane (Aconitum napellus) is also known as monkshood or aconite. It produces deep blue flowers that resemble bells or the hoods of monks’ robes. Tingling and burning skin irritation can occur from contact with the plants; ingestion of 20 to 40 milliliters is fatal. Because it is extremely deadly, it was probably mentioned as being part of Flying Ointment, asserts Sarah Penicka in her article “Caveat Anoynter! A Study of Flying Ointments and Their Plants” (The Dark Side Journal, University of Sydney Department of Studies in Religion, 2004). Interestingly, she asserts that mandrake was not part of the recipe, contradicting both Francis Bacon and Theodric—she excludes it because it is not a hallucinogenic. 

Wormwood (Artemisia absinthium): “It is considered a mind-altering substance,” writes Judy Ann Nock in her book, The Modern Witchcraft Guide to Magickal Herbs (Adams Media, 2019). Wormwood first grew along the trail of the biblical serpent, asserts A History of Magic. A History of Magic also asserts that in magic spells, it can be used for revenge.

Datura: The Datura genus holds nine poisonous plants. Common names for some types are jimsonweed, thorn apples, devil’s trumpets, devil’s weed, hell’s bells, and moonflower. Datura inoxia produces large, white, conical flowers. When bruised or crushed, datura inoxia emits a strong, funky odor, according to PlantWorld Seeds, a garden supply resource—the seeds are $3.65 a packet for the gardeners who dare. All parts of daturas are toxic if ingested. Some skin and mucous membrane irritation can occur, and the plants are hallucinogenic. Datura plants have been used for centuries in many indigenous cultures’ spiritual ceremonies. Sarah Penicka asserts that datura was never part of medieval or early modern European witches’ Flying Ointment because “it had not yet arrived from the New World.”

Hemlock (Conium maculatum): The plant produces tiny, delicate white flowers similar to those on flowering carrot tops or tops of wild carrot. Hemlock was steadfastly associated with witchcraft in Europe, as were many herbs simply for their deadly poisonous nature, not so much that they were hallucinogenic, notes Sarah Penicka.

Belladonna (Atropa belladonna): Beautiful but brutal belladonna beguiles. Its cherry-sized berries, black when ripe, contain an inky, sweet juice that is extremely toxic and often fatal if ingested. Also known as Deadly Nightshade (it is in the Solanaceae nightshade family with potatoes, eggplants, and tomatoes), it is native to North Africa, Europe, and parts of western Asia.

Henbane (Hyoscyamus niger): Henbane is such a powerful hallucinogen that skin or mucous membrane contact with its fat, hairy leaves or its big yellowish flowers can cause delirium and illness. A History of Magic asserts that the Oracle at Delphi smoked dried henbane to achieve her future-predicting trances. Henbane was often rumored to be in Flying Ointment. It was “freely associated” with witchcraft in the time of Shakespeare, Sarah Penicka notes. In Magickal Herbs, Judy Ann Nock implores today’s magically inclined practitioners not to ingest, inhale, or even burn henbane.

The biggest surprise of all in regard to Flying Ointment’s possible ingredients is that common parsley appears in a few sources. Sarah Penicka attempts to unravel the reason, concluding that parsley could not shake a very long association it had with death.

The deadly plants and herbs associated with Flying Ointment and witchcraft throughout time may remain a source of fascination and temptation, as will the archetype of the Witch. Scholar Daniel A. Schulke writes in his book Veneficium: Magic, Witchcraft, and the Poison Path: “Poison in various forms was also closely associated with the witch, and used in magical contexts. . . . [The] knowledge and use of toxins, from the most ancient of times, has been proscribed by law and religious decree. Like the witch, whose presence in communities was regarded as insidious and polluting, the presence of poison is often undetectable, lurking unseen until it has exacted a toll in victims. This shared countenance of the grotesque inspires fear and awe, and has animated the violent aversion to both the witch and poison over time.” Noting, however that human nature is incorrigibly curious, “like the nubile guise of witch, poison may also be alluring. . . . In this guise both witch and poison serve to arouse and allure, even if doing so with profound unease.”

Happy Halloween!

Erin Pedigo is a full-time freelance copyeditor and proofreader.

I would learn later that my left shoulder blade sits five centimeters higher than it would on a normal body. My scapula, the doctor called it. The x-ray showed a spiked white stick straight down the middle—my spine. On the right, evenly dispersed rows of translucent oblique curves. On the left, the same curves splayed out wildly like a hand flat on a table. When looking left, I come up short. My left hand can raise the roof, but only just. If I hold my arms out straight to each side— for cross-body toe touches or the prance before a leap into a twisting, somersaulting dive—I reveal a problematic ridge near my left cheek, a bump, a foreignness not visible on the other side. Better shown than told, and thus something revealed at parties in college to liven up a group. When I reach for an inconveniently placed item, my left arm lunges a little farther than my right. The arm I use to snatch a bag of fast food or hand the officer my license is my right and not my left. It forces neighboring elements to shift, squirm, make way, my neck craning a bit to the right, my left hip sometimes pinched and pulsing, my left hand less likely to endure two hours of guitar. When I sit at desks to write or at computers to type or at tables to flip through a magazine, I find that my left arm lies like a lazy cat in front of me, perpendicular to my chest, a brace for my torso, a buttress of sorts. When I heard the commotion out the front door, years before I knew about scapulas or that mine was different, this was how I was sitting at our old dining room table. I leaned on my left arm, unaware then it was no twin to my right, my attention stimulated and engrossed by whatever paper was before me. It was not clear to me in the moment how I alone had heard the noise. But perhaps my brother Jon or our mom had heard it too but didn’t care, whereas my curiosity (more than once described sneeringly as nosiness) was alert, intrigued, squinting to see what could be seen. I remember being perched at the dining room table because I was doing homework. That’s where we did homework in those days. At the dining room table. This was a way to locate the activity in a single recognizable place to foster the formation of consistent scholastic habits (our mom was a teacher, after all, who knew these things), but, it was also often like the middle airplane seat, the only open spot. Our house was, like the fresh draft beers I would savor in college, filled to the brim and sometimes went over it. Chairs and end tables and bookcases and books and knick-knacks and small picture frames and glass figurines that filled them took up whatever space was unoccupied by us, by our own bodies. Worktables, desks, large surfaces on which to write or read, or otherwise industriously labor, were rare or rarely clean. Homework in those days consisted of math problems or short written responses to a reading. Something boring. For children like me. Age is a mystery in hindsight, but my feet by then reliably found the tile below my chair, compelling me into socks to avoid the unnerving frigidity of the white squares. Since I never did homework on the weekends, it was almost certainly a school night. When we had to be in bed earlier than normal. When homework, like the garden, had to be managed and looked after and occasionally ignored, left to lie fallow till next year. A conundrum of our house, at which more than once I had wrinkled my nose and blinked my eyes, was that we called it the dining room table, whether it was in the dining room or not. Mom was a proverbial mover. A consummate shaker. Couldn’t sit still even if you tied her down, and so the house shifted and squirmed, was tweaked and modified and altered just to stave off . . . something. I could not name it then, but later would find the words, some possible explanations: ennui, frustration, death. We dragged small tables from one corner to another. Maneuvered with finesse and brute strength—both of which mom displayed in spades—looming cabinets and cheap bookcases to this room and then to that. Hung one picture here and found another in a closet to go over there. Painted one wall forest green. Another light brown. Inexpertly rolled brushes around the bathroom until it resembled an orange, the glow from beneath the door in the early morning hallway the disturbingly exact color of the fruit. The dining room table was long and tall, with a removable middle. Real wood. The middle was called the leaf. A word I never understood, given that it looked nothing like a leaf. Also, the additional dissonance of leaves being what was attached to or otherwise associated with the real wood originally and not themselves, the actual leaves, in any way wood. I used to crouch down on my hands and knees—temporarily suspending my personal ban on touching the tile with bare skin—to study the swooping, s-shaped legs that terminated in the paws of some animal I did not recognize. The whole thing was, like my mom, a bit wobbly as the years slipped by. We wedged old magazines— People and Better Homes & Gardens—under a paw to avoid a common scenario where one of us boys, usually me, rested his legs on the table’s own only to leap to some other activity, jolting glasses full of soda to empty their contents, like a spilled eighteen-wheeler on the highway, across a surface already scarred and stained from many such skirmishes. Years later, Mom had me lug the table out onto the patio—she had little energy then for such things—to taskmaster me through the job of spray painting it a bright metallic blue. A wild color. But she was wild. Had always wanted a blue table, and several years into cancer, she’d got one. I would not have seen the lights but only heard the commotion out front. A rustling. Some beat or step or click that was unfamiliar or out of place with the atmosphere of a normal school night. Something to catch and hold on to briefly, like high school love or a fish in the river beneath your feet. The TV was in the living room then. Like the seasons, it came and went. The table, too, slotted here, then there, as we wrestled with the monotony of life, the daily desire for this one to be different than the last. This, on occasion, discombobulated me when mom would ask, say, for one of us to put a bowl of food on the dining room table and, to do so, we would exit the dining room and enter the living room. We managed, though. Linguistically, I mean. Physically, literally, we ate anywhere, on the couch with pillows on our laps, in our rooms illuminated by the glow of our own TVs, rarely at the namesake table itself, which may account for our elastic definition and perpetual shifting of it from one room to another. We called the biggest TV in the house “the TV” and referred to it as such, using other possessors to signify all others. Mom’s TV. Jon’s TV. Jeff’s TV. When the TV was in the dining room, that meant the dining room table was somewhere else, either the living room or the no-man’s land between the two rooms, a space occupied by more tile and a narrow galley kitchen that looked out onto the dining room. I noticed sometimes that when the dining room table was somewhere else, we called the dining room the den. This seems very confusing now, but it wasn’t at the time. My mom never called it that. A galley kitchen. I didn’t learn the term until much later, which is odd, her not calling it that. She often told others about roller skating from the university in the South to her job as a line cook in a galley kitchen in the North. She liked to joke about the head chef, a thickly accented German who was cruel and mean and to whom all the other kitchen staff gave a very specific salute whenever he turned his back. Perhaps for her, the association of her own kitchen with the earlier one—a place of drug abuse and casual sexual harassment, where she met my father and her eventual ex-husband—was not a bundle of feelings and memories she enjoyed unwrapping. Now that I, too, am an adult and can turn over and examine her considerations and worries, I can see how the names we give to things—reveries, rooms, each other—imbue them with meanings we hope will stick. For example, we called it a house more than anything else, but it was a townhouse after all. We shared one wall with our neighbors and the other with the world. On the end of a row. The logic of the complex we lived in meant that we were a single-story dwelling, unlike most of our neighbors. I do not know for sure and do not even know who I would ask, but I always, from a very young age, assumed that the reason the ends of rows in our complex—which had many rows and many homes all swirling around a central clubhouse and pool—were single-story while every other home was two was because it made it easier for anybody doing work on a roof to get to them, the roofs. It was a very simple act I saw every time I watched them out my bedroom window, to lean one small ladder against the outside wall of our house and then heave up it another small ladder which they then laid against the second-story wall of our neighbor’s house. I never saw them lay the second ladder, but I could envision it. Mom used to go out the front door and accost them whenever they did this. Whoever it was. Roofers hired by our HOA. Cable companies. HVAC repairmen. They were always men with ladders and uniforms and taut faces. Too much squinting into the sun from the tops of houses. Always showed up looking like they’d already been out there for hours. Mom would head out the front door with no fear and no consideration for what she had on, the keys in her hand jangling as a sort of snake’s rattle, and hound them off the small ladders and make them get out the big double ones and go straight up the front of a neighbor’s two-story. She used to say all the time, to them but also to us, that the bylaws (I did not know what this word, bylaws, meant) said they couldn’t trample all over our roof to get to anybody else’s. Because it would erode our roof quicker, and since all the roofs were redone in fixed cycles, we would have a worse roof by the end of every cycle. I never understood what it meant to have a worse roof, but when Mom was adamant about something, we nodded. Said yes. Hummed assent. I cannot account for mom’s incuriousness about the noise out front—she being the closest one to the action—except that her inviolable space of serenity and calm was anywhere that had a TV, a novel, and a glass of ice freshly acquainted with Diet Dr Pepper and that the living room that night checked all the boxes. She could lounge anywhere with a book and beverage, but nevertheless enjoyed the accompaniment of black-and-white reruns, local news, anything providing sufficient white noise for her exploration of fictional worlds. Our front door opened onto a sidewalk that fell down to a larger, perpendicular one. There were patches of grass in between our little front yard. To the right was the rest of the complex. A tree-lined thoroughfare that led to other houses, other neighbors, among them my grandparents, just four or five doors down. Most of the trees, like my grandparents, are gone now. Felled in storms or removed preemptively before the next storm came. To the left of us was the side street. That’s what we called it, because it wasn’t the main street but the street that jutted off the main street and curved around the complex until it hit another, different main street. The side street was the locus of much voyeuristic activity for me. My bedroom, the closest thing I had to a tower, a castle, some large edifice carved into the side of a mountain from which to see the valleys I ruled, afforded a compelling and addictive view for somebody like me who loved watching. I saw dog owners dragged forward by their charges and others who had to yank on the leash so their own would keep up. Local kids who pelted each other with the inedible fruit of a nearby tree. Old couples who marched briskly, clutching water bottles and sun guards. If I was doing math homework, I would have been very bored. At that age, math homework consisted of simplicity and elegance. Timetables and basic algebra. I seemed to never forget anything when I was young, so I could never tell, when I worked through problems, fifty or a hundred all in a row, if I was actually “doing math,” or if I was merely remembering the same Lego-like equations we saw over and over again. 13-7=6. 2 x 8=16. 24 + 12 =36. Vocabulary quizzes were the same. Did I know the words, or could I clearly see in my mind the sheet of paper on which we had to write out by hand, as the teacher revealed them on the chalkboard, the spelling of the word and its definition side by side? This was the secret, for a long time unknown to me, to my early academic success. I could recall a picture of yesterday’s paper, and that was that. That I was perpetually confused by my classmates’ struggles does not, in hindsight, seem all that unusual. What was, though, was my mom’s indifference to the commotion outside. It sticks out for this reason. She loved looking over our neighbor’s fence. Noises in the area excited her because of what they might portend. A car backfiring could also instead have been a gun. A boom in the distance might be a transformer shorting out a neighborhood’s electrical grid. We drove toward clouds in hopes of finding rain. We followed erratic cars on the freeway just to see what they would do. She wasn’t a gossip, though, or at least gossip was not the intention. I believe she enjoyed knowing what was going on in the same way she enjoyed having read every book in our house. She was a collector. Trinkets, whispers, relics, anecdotes, colorful objects, curiosities, wonders. We were never rich, so she settled for books and whatever antique hunting rustled up. But had the universe rewound and let the performance play again, Mom would have been out the door before I’d even acknowledged the weird nagging at my neck, before I knew anything was under or afoot. If on a vocab test I saw in my head what I’d written down on paper the day before, this was an accomplishment of another kind as well: nobody could read my handwriting, often not even me, and throughout adolescence, it was the only stain on my academic record, the only box in the weirdly formal elementary school grade cards mailed to parents twice a year that had anything other than an “O,” which I believe stood for “outstanding,” though the other grading nomenclature wasn’t as obvious. This suggests perhaps that it was not a reading assignment in front of me on the table after all, because they required, post-reading, the production of answers to short written prompts. I surely would have been preoccupied with the frustration of holding my hand steady to form on the page big billowing letters, C’s and S’s and P’s, in an effort at legibility. I had learned that the bigger the letters, sometimes cartoonishly large, the easier for somebody to read them. There are juvenile writings and scattered lists in a box in my closet that appear to be the work of a person experiencing a psychotic break; everything penned in large, uneven lettering slipping up and down the page at random intervals in my desperate attempt to please my teachers. A hard-to-account-for memory is of sitting at the dining room table and facing the back door—which means I couldn’t possibly have seen anything out the living room window, but had to have heard it first. Maybe I’d gotten up to get a drink or a snack. Used the restroom. An opportunity to move around and verify that the lingering pulse in my spine was, in fact, related to events out front and not just restlessness. I called out that something was up, just a normal line about some sound or a scattering of light from the window in the living room. Nothing extraordinary or a cause for alarm. No elevated voice or temperature. Just standard interest. I can recall quite distinctly Mom saying that I should go investigate. She used that word. Investigate. A word from our vocab lists, almost certainly. Just complicated enough to require some work to get ahold of as a child. Maybe Mom had not heard anything. Maybe the TV show she was watching was in the final scene, or the book in her hands was pages from the end. Maybe I felt something inside me a bit queer and was compelled to interrupt homework, the ticking of the old clock in the corner, rote math problems. I must have grabbed keys from somewhere. I had my own set at that age, but I don’t know where I would have kept it. Maybe there was a bowl for such things. As I walked to the front door, crossing the galley kitchen, I saw something strange beyond the window. I didn’t have time to work through it. Movement. A slightly drawn curtain. Indiscernible bodies. Flicker of lights. The new vocabulary words each day contained letter combinations I hadn’t seen before. Like my first beer in college, they required several sips and swallows to get them under my tongue. I had to move them around like the green mouthwash at the dentist, understand their contours, discern their ridges and valleys. Much like what I was doing with the images out the window. I opened the front door, a big heavy wooden one that over the years has loosened a bit and requires an occasional tightening of the screws, a door that’s still out in the living room with the paint on the inside that we put there ourselves years ago, when Mom was still here, but long after this particular episode. I don’t remember when we painted it. High school, maybe. In the light of that afternoon, when we’d purchased the bucket of paint—which from the outside gave no notice of the color it contained—the door had been bright red. Pristine. The lips of an actress. But later, when the sun lowered, it deepened to something closer to the wine I would see later at a friend’s house. But then, the only association I had was of blood, what came out of me after I fell from a bike or caught a piece of paper at the right angle. Beyond the wooden door, what we called the inside door, was another one. The wrought iron door. It required a second key, another turn of the wrist. Our complex’s defense against the nonexistent waves of crime we were always told to fear and look out for and report on. I did not know this word “wrought,” but it appeared in my adolescence with unnatural frequency because my uncle, one of my mom’s younger brothers, spent his life shaping great heaps of iron into fancy, swirling gates that rich people custom-ordered for their gated compounds (presumably to keep out people like my uncle). Everybody called them “wrought iron.” Phil made another wrought iron gate. Here’s a picture. Wouldja look at that wrought iron gate. I cannot even imagine how many years it was before I realized everybody in my family was saying “wrought” and not “rot.” Even later, I would hear it spoken by others, and sometimes envision iron rotted out like an old tree trunk and wonder anew why somebody would use it to make anything. I presumably saw the tableau in its entirety as I opened the wrought iron door, but I had trouble processing the individual elements. Like the new words, I had to articulate each component, put them into my mind, associate them with other things I had seen. I stepped four or five feet downward off the front steps into the patch of grass in front of our window and saw him on a gurney. They were just feet from me. Almost at arm’s length. It is a strange word. Gurney. Uncommon and not like other words, so it was hard to make connections. “Castling” in chess obviously comes from “castle.” “Helper” from “help.” But gurney offered mysteries I could not see through at that age. Several people surrounded him, almost a crowd, different uniforms, all men, blues and reds and some white, everyone participating as they guided the gurney towards the side street where I saw now an ambulance, the source of the lights I couldn’t account for. It had no siren, which greatly expanded my growing discomfort. On the road, we would see the lights up ahead and cover our ears before the blistering sound arrived and washed over us like a bad dream. Without the siren, seeing the lights flashing throughout our small side street unnerved me, like the first time I saw a three-legged dog or whenever my mom would raise her voice on the phone with my dad. There was a fire truck, too. I learned later that fire trucks were often the first to respond to incidents like this. Everybody was so big. I was not, and so their normal size seemed enormous, but later, when I was older and visiting a fire station on a school trip, I realized how much clothing they wore and how thick and immense it was and that underneath, they were just the same as any other adult I knew. Smaller, even. I very vividly can see them jaggedly navigating the gurney across the downward-sloping grass and this meant they had shortcut the normal right-angled path from the front steps of my neighbor’s house, which gave their appearance an odd and out-of-place tinge of rebellion because us children were forever being asked by adults to mind the grass and use the sidewalk. They were not moving very quickly, but there was purpose, intent. There are rocks now where the grass used to be, and, in my mind, I hear their crunch, but I know this is just a brain “solution” to a problem that doesn’t exist. The insertion of contemporary memories into older ones to make them cohere to the most recent information. There were so many of them. Eight or nine or ten. Some police officers, too, maybe, but perhaps that’s an invention after all this time. He and his wife lived next door. They were young and full of energy and friendly, and what little records I can find today show they didn’t live there very long, but at my age then, two years was forever. We were told later—or more likely we overheard mom on the phone with a friend—that his wife, on returning home from work, had found him hanging in the living room. He was round and warm and funny and sad around the eyes with a mop of hair and the kind of smile that showed he really cared. We never saw the wife again. Others came and moved everything out of the house, and somebody else moved in. His name was Jeff. Just like me.

I’m currently reading The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, and working on a collection of stories. I like to take photographs and sometimes share them at www.jeffweyant.com.

My father shuffles into my room at the nursing home every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

“Hello, dear!” he says in his raspy, old-man voice. He’s always cheerful despite having to visit his daughter in a facility for people who cannot take care of themselves. I turn my head as far as I can in his direction. My entire body feels encased in concrete.

“Hi, Dad!” I say with all the cheer I can muster.

He walks toward me with a hobble and a slight hunch in his back. His pants sag at the waist, but he has them cinched tight with an old belt he used to wear in the Navy. He’s armed with his usual bag of peanut butter cups.

“I've had this belt for over fifty years,” he tells me with pride. “I weighed 110 pounds when I went into the service and this belt was issued to me. Now, it fits again!”

He reaches down and puts his thumb between his belt and his pants. He tugs at the belt to show how it snugly fits around his waist. He looks at me with excited, arched eyebrows flecked with dandruff. I can’t help but smile.

My dad lost more than thirty pounds when my neck was broken a few years back. He was absolutely delighted to be able to use that belt for a second time. I, on the other hand, was deeply saddened that my injury was the cause of his weight loss.

I know it must be so hard for him to visit me in a place like this. He in his eighties, and I in my fifties; our roles should be reversed. I think we both always assumed that when he reached an age where he could no longer care for himself, I would move into his house and provide for his needs. Now everything feels jumbled up. I wonder if he lays in bed at night and asks God, or the air, or the spirit of my deceased mother, why this has happened to his daughter.

Before my body became paralyzed, I was such a go-getter and fiercely independent. He always expressed how proud he was of me working as a professional in several well-known companies. He and my mom graduated from high school, but college was out of the question. Back in their day, secondary education was only accessible to the rich, so he was wowed by my accomplishments, even though I didn’t think they were that amazing.

Now I have days when I wonder what reasons my dad has to be proud of me. I live in a place that often smells like poop and pee and seems to be a holding tank for the elderly waiting to die. We often have “yellers” on the hall who cry out for help day and night, and despondent wanderers, who walk into other residents’ rooms looking for their long-departed spouses.

On top of that, I am completely dependent on others. I need them to bathe and feed me and make sure I get my 20+ medications each day to keep me functioning more comfortably.

My urine flows out of an opening in my abdomen. My feces are expelled at night after I receive a suppository, a laxative, and several stool softeners. Assigned to a shared room, I’m always embarrassed by the stench as I wait for my nursing aide to come and change my diaper and spray air freshener to put my roommate out of her misery. I miss the days when I could withstand nature’s calls until what felt like a more convenient time.

I look over at my dad. We catch eyes. I breathe a sigh of resignation.

“Dad, you don’t have to come here three times a week. I know that puts a lot of burden on you, and it must be depressing.”

My dad gets out of the chair, walks over to my bed, and pushes the hair off my forehead. He tenderly kisses me there.

“I’m your father, and this is my job. I happen to like my job,” he says.

“Shall we enjoy some peanut butter cups?”

With trembling, age-spotted hands, he unwraps the candy, breaks it in half, and gently places it in my mouth.

Terri Nida is currently working on her memoirs, and is now reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp, and The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr, all to strengthen her writing. Terri’s blog can be found here.

Ulrich, who can charm mustard off a bockwurst, finagles me a sublet flat in Charlottenburg from a proper and exacting woman. The landlady is named Frau Weingartner—“winemaker”—though I never feel the bounty of alcohol in her presence. As her son, Ulrich’s gymnasium acquaintance, is himself off to study physics in Indiana, it makes cosmic sense for an American to stay in his apartment. Ideally set up, spic and span, it sports a long and narrow kitchen and substantial pantry, as well as a compact bathroom, a storage room, and an ample living area for sleeping, studying, and entertaining. Facing south, overlooking a quiet courtyard, the apartment embraces the sun—though only a mere trickle of rays emerges in a winter seeming to last ages in late ’88 and early ’89. The building itself sits directly across garden allotments by the station Jungfernheide, whence I can travel to anywhere in the western part of the city by the U- or S-Bahn, Berlin’s main subway lines.

Heating is provided by a beautifully crafted ceramic Kachelofen or tile stove, supplied with coal kept in the cellar. Since the flat sits on the second floor (American third floor), this means multiple flights carrying metal pails whose handles dig into my palms, weighed down by coal briquettes from the cellar on the way up and ashes on the way down. After a time, I exploit two American chums, who carry enough fuel for weeks in exchange for dinner. When a ton of coal arrives, I count the number of bundles the men carry on their backs to the cellar. A friend confides they hate it when she does the same, but one shouldn’t be cheated.

The Berlin coal aroma becomes my Proustian madeleine.

Ulrich negotiates my rent. The first of every month, I leave an envelope filled with cash on a plate set upon the doily-festooned wooden kitchen table. If I’m not at home, Frau Weingartner lets herself in with a key she has retained to make sure—I suspect—that this untamed American woman is not throwing wild parties. Little does she know, I am almost as proper and exacting as she, though in an entirely different register.

Frau Weingartner would have frowned upon my more nefarious activities in East Germany, but as far as West Berlin was concerned, I was a model citizen. So much so that I became registered as a West Berlin resident, allowing me various perks while traveling across the wall into the German Democratic Republic. These included the ability to stay in the Hauptstadt der DDR—Berlin (East)—for up to twenty-four hours. This permission, in turn, required the address of a contact. But my story here does not cross that particular border.

Initially, I had no proof that Frau Weingartner poked around the flat when I wasn’t there. One day, a neatly handwritten note is left on the china plate requesting that I close the curtains of the living space while absent so the carpet won’t fade—though how anything could fade in the thin, weak light of chilly Berlin (West), I can barely imagine. Another time, Frau Weingartner reminds me to leave the garbage outside the door in a plastic bag for the concierge to pick up twice a week. Her hovering and spectral presence means I have to endure oversight.

Spies exist in both East and West Berlin.

I have only one issue—a teensy-weensy problem—with the flat. I’m the first to admit it is due to squeamishness. The toilet has begun to—there’s no other way to put it—clog. Due to leave for a ten-day teaching trip in East Germany, I have no time to tend to this slight inconvenience. Every time I flush after—shall we call it Number Two?—most of my waste and paper stay in the bowl. I then fetch one of the plastic shopping bags Frau Weingartner insists on being left out for the concierge. I manually fill it with my toilet paper and even—dare we say it?—filth. I hang it on a hook embedded in the door of the pantry off the kitchen, a door I typically keep closed.

Why is the toilet not flushing properly? I can’t imagine what the problem is. Why am I forced to live as though I were in the woods? Even that would have been better. I have peed and pooped many a time on Girl Scout trips in the open air. This is somehow unnatural. Yet I have no choice. My visa is set, my students await, and I am in no way going to mess with the government of the German Democratic Republic to delay my trip for a mere ill-placed turd or two.

I merrily head off to teach in Rostock. Upon my return, I enter the flat, exhale, and relax.

Until Ulrich calls. He is privy (no pun intended) to her schedule. “Frau Weingartner is furious!”

“What?” Oh dear, she has discovered my illicit plastic bag of effluence.

“She went into the flat” (which maybe she shouldn’t have been going into anyway), “and the toilet exploded.”

“Exploded?”

“She flushed and it exploded!”

“How could it have exploded?”

“The lower flush was fine, but the harder flush wasn’t.”

“Lower flush? Harder?”

“You know. How the toilet has two flush settings.”

“What?”

Silence at the other end of the line. Then, “You do know you press a light flush for pee-pee and a longer flush for Scheiße?”

Silence again, though now from my end of the line. Then I say, “No. I think I was just doing the light flush all along.”

Well, that explains that.

Ulrich thinks me a “dear little idiot,” for that is just what he calls me. “I will let Frau Weingartner know. It would help if you apologized.”

“Of course! Of course!”

Light flush? Hard flush? This was something new to a girl used to pulling chains in England. A vague memory of Erica Jong ascribing German toilet construction to the same mentality that concocted the Final Solution flashes in my mind. I might add at this point that thirty years later, upon revisiting the building of my one-time flat, I tripped outside the threshold. There, embedded in the sidewalk, exactly where I had crossed thousands of times, were Stolpersteine—golden markers commemorating Jews who had lived there only to have been murdered in Nazi extermination camps.

After the phone call, I check the pantry. Opening the door, I discover the plastic bag sloshing around, pristine—so to speak—and undiscovered. A sigh of relief.

The next day, after I have unpacked and slept, I write an unctuous, though heartfelt, note to Frau Weingartner. Placing it in my little pink backpack, bundling up against the bitter chill, I grab the bag with its swilling mess and casually drop it into a trash can on my way to the U-Bahn. I finally arrive at the station closest to Frau Weingartner’s own flat. I had hitherto only associated Spandau with Rudolph Hess, the sole prisoner in its prison for decades. The district office tower looms over me as I consult a foldable Falk map. Ah, there’s Frau Weingartner’s flat, whose address I’d been given in case of emergency. Exploding toilets, considering the munitions of that particular detonation, surely count as emergencies. I make sure to buy the largest bouquet of flowers available.

When I ring below at the street, there is no answer. Fortunately, the ground floor door is ajar. Up and up I climb, clutching the bouquet close. Outside Frau Weingartner’s door, I ring and even knock. Waiting, I hear nothing. Then, I place the floral garland on the doormat with my note snuggled atop. Pausing, I look down at my sacrifice to Hestia, the goddess of the hearth.

The next day, Ulrich calls. Frau Weingartner was bursting with delight at the groveling letter and extravagant oblation. After this point, she no longer visits my flat, except to pick up the rent.

            *   *   *   *   *   *  

Only decades later do I realize that Frau Weingartner had probably been in her late teens or early twenties when the Soviets barged into Berlin at the end of the war. We all know what had happened to females—elderly, mothers, and children—at that time.

I don’t know the story of Frau Weingartner. But I do know this: she would be welcome into any flat of mine at any time—even if she did chastise me for flushing improperly.

A Texas-based professor of medieval literature, Dr. Susan Signe Morrison has long been committed to bringing the lives of women hidden in the shadows of history to a wider audience. “The Landlady” constitutes one chapter from a book she’s writing about her Stasi or secret police file, kept on her when she lived in West Berlin 1988‑90 and taught in the former East Germany. This file contains multiple unusual (and false) assertions. Unbeknownst to her at the time, the head professor in East Germany was her Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or unofficial collaborator, reporting on her to the Stasi. Nevertheless, through his intervention and invitations, she was invited to return periodically to East Germany to teach. Using multiple documents, including her journals, personal letters, and official documents like the Stasi file, she’s creating a narrative investigating the past. She’s on an artist residency through the Cordts Art Foundation in Berlin for the summer of 2024, working on this book.

*All photos were provided by Susan Signe Morrison.

“You’re the only one of the children,” my grandmother declared, including, I understood, myself, my brother and cousin, and my mother and two aunts in this generalization, “who cares about my jewelry.” By her jewelry, she meant, specifically, her rings, and she made this pronouncement as an explanation, as much to herself as to me, of why she had decided to give me her ruby ring on my tenth birthday. I required no explanation of such a boon gift—never had I been given a treasure like it, and the thrill was intensified by my grandmother’s telling me when the ring would become mine years in advance of the occasion so that I could savor the anticipation. It was heightened even more by this explicit confirmation of our shared love of sparkly spangles that clinked on our fingers, burdening our hands with the weight of our idea of beauty.

How I had coveted that ring! I thought it was the most elegant thing I’d seen, a gold circlet crowned with a cluster of seven tiny, faceted rubies. In truth, it was not much more than a bauble, real fourteen-carat gold, to be sure, but the rubies were hardly more than chips off a stone that had been full enough of flaws and blemishes that it couldn’t be cut into a single large and expensive gem. She wore the ring on her pinky, an accent, and if I asked, she would let me try it on each of my fingers. As I neared the designated birthday, the much-longed-for achievement of my first decade, the ring began to fit securely enough on my ring finger to be safe there. I could hardly wait until it became mine.

Undoubtedly, the two things signified most often by rings are the wearer’s wealth and status and the wearer’s condition of bondage to someone in marriage or other religious commitment. Royalty has for centuries flaunted rings that served as proof of identity and emblems of power. Nuns sometimes wear rings to signify their commitment—their unbreakable bond—to God or Jesus. And people of many faiths, even the most committed atheists among them, wear rings to signify that they belong to a husband or wife. The circle that to some symbolizes eternal love can also be seen as an enclosure, a symbol of being bound to someone. As a notion, belonging is a mixed bag. Nearly everyone wishes to belong to others in the sense of feeling understood, accepted, recognized, and cherished. But belonging has a darker side. The wedding ring can as easily stand for the trafficking of women as possessions passed from father to husband as it can stand for a mutually felt bond of affection.

My grandmother wore, as many American women do, an engagement ring and wedding band on her left hand, but she also wore rings on several other fingers. I loved the familiar rhythms of her particular ways of fidgeting: flicking a thumbnail to twist a ring around and around on its finger, a nervous percussion she’d play once she’d completed the ritual of lighting a cigarette and holding it aloft between two fingers, elbow propped on the Formica tabletop that clicked under the nails and rings on her free hand. She was rarely still. The rings twisted around her fingers because they had to be large enough to slide over knuckles slightly knobby with arthritis; then their heavy stones would turn on her finger to where gravity or fidgeting pulled them.

She’d complain of how ugly the swollen joints made her hands look, and I’m sure the rings were in part a touch meant to distract the eye, hers as much as anyone’s, from the evidence of age that hands offer up with appalling accuracy. At ten, though, I couldn’t see her hands as old. They were simply hers, and I must have studied them like a sacred text back then, because as I write this over twenty years after her death, I can conjure her hands in memory almost as clearly as I can see my own, now nearly as old as hers when I was ten. How she dialed a rotary phone, how she held a cigarette lighter, how she wrote left-handed and, to impress me, in mirror-script as easy as you please, how she played the piano, making up the left-hand harmonies as she went along, singing pop songs from World War I and II, “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover,” maybe, in an alto voice I thought then was lovely, though it was untrained and roughened by decades of smoking.

I might now be inclined to see the constant motion of her hands as an expression of nerves, the anxiety I would later recognize in myself, as well as in her increasingly distrustful and harsh view of the world. But as an admiring child, I was fascinated with the way she moved in the world, awed both by the great many things her hands did with skill and confidence and by the notion that I might, by some fortune, turn out to be like her.

After all, what does the idea of blood-relation mean to a child? A tremendous portion of growing up and becoming a distinct person with a sense of individual identity is the process of discovering what you have inherited through the microscopic mystery of DNA and what you can lay claim to by other means. Much of what our genetic material holds in store for us takes a lifetime to be revealed—the deficits and mutations, the overproduction of this or the total failure of something else. Even the visible traits that point to this parent or that great-uncle can shift during a lifetime’s changing hormones and habits—the blonde hair that made a child the spitting image of an aunt darkens and curls, and the resemblance fades. My brother, whose baby face was indistinguishable from our mother’s baby face in side-by-side photos, resembles, in his manhood, no one so much as an amalgam of both grandfathers, the curved cheeks and broad smile of his mother chiseled and strained by time and other forces.

Throughout one’s childhood, adults analyze and assess one’s identity, often in deeply conflicting, and therefore confusing, ways. “You look just like your pretty mother,” many a well-meaning woman has chirped at me smilingly. But I’ve known this assertion to be objectively untrue since I was very young. When someone tells me this, is it because they believe they see it? Or is it merely something people say on the spot as a species of polite conversation, a statement they believe will be pleasing to both mother and daughter?

Even more mysterious are the likenesses of temperament, skill, or inclination. The inheritance of traits, like blood type or eye color, can eventually be attributed to the interplay of dominant and recessive genes, probabilities worked out in neat boxes on the pages of one’s high school biology notebook, each Punnett square a window of sorts into the makeup of the self with a view of the blood-roads your cells traveled to become you. But what of the rest of what makes you yourself?

Even now, in the twenty-first century, we hardly know how much of an ability to play the piano is hereditary and how much depends on practice, encouragement, socioeconomic class, and the ways one was exposed to music from birth onward. No one seems to be able to account adequately for how Shakespeare became a poet or Jane Austen a novelist whom an entire world would admire for centuries. And in a household, regardless of how the familial features combine and manifest in the children, the people those children turn out to be—or to be like—are nearly impossible to predict or, in retrospect, to account for, which makes a vexed question of this: What is inheritance, anyway?

As a ten-year-old admiring the flash of precious stones on my grandmother’s fingers as she palmed a bowling ball, showing me how to steady it and take aim, I might’ve told you I wanted to be like her, smart and active, sharp-tongued and capable of learning to do nearly anything that interested her. But I believed then, as I’m sure I was encouraged to, that such resemblances weren’t a product of deliberate effort but were revealed over time to be one’s fate and sometimes one’s doom. Would you be lucky, or would you be cursed? What would be your burden to bear, and what would you learn to regard as the gift that eased the burden?

Such questions were too much for one so young to ponder and fret over. What I wanted, time and again, was a sign, and another, and another. I craved those rare instances when an adult would tell me, unsolicited, who I looked or sounded like so that I could feel, for that moment, anchored in a recognizable self, sure I knew, for as long as it lasted, what someone else saw when they looked at me.

The ruby ring was a tangible sign of the bond between my grandmother and me, the more important to me because I did not resemble her in any visible way. No one else in my family (I thought because she had told me it was so) shared what we shared, an appreciation for a particular sort of beautiful object and for the way that the gift of a prized possession could extend a line of connection between two people across time, a proxy for physical presence when such a substitute became necessary. As a wedding ring concretely circles a finger with the reminder of the vows two people have made one another, the ruby ring is never not an instant emblem of my grandmother’s particular relationship with me, less literal and gruesome than the medieval reliquary rings that held fragments of bones, hair, or garments, but nearly as religious. Little else that I have ever owned has possessed such potent and singular significance.

* * *

In my face as it has aged, I find no trace of my mother’s mother, nor do I see her in my hands as they appear before me daily, unadorned, nails unpolished and short, kneading a loaf of bread or tapping a computer’s keyboard to the rhythm of my inner voice. What did she think of this child who in no way mirrored her despite our certain relation, she who was an identical twin, who had lived her whole life with a flesh-and-blood mirror image of herself? My hands, now showing their age unmistakably in a certain translucence that reveals their meshwork of bone, tendon, and blood vessels blue and knotty, remain bare most days, ringless despite my longstanding love of rings. For years I compromised, one day wearing all gold rings inherited from her, and the next all silver ones I’d bought myself. Later, I only wore silver, the larger and heavier the better, on as many fingers as I could find a ring to fit. These days, I put on rings for special occasions, for extra sparkle, but in the course of a day, they feel like encumbrance I don’t need. They weigh on my fingers like time.

Never have my hands worn a wedding band nor a diamond solitaire engagement ring. In that, as in so many things, I do not resemble my grandmother, who, I believe, preferred her three daughters married as unhappily as she was to their remaining unmarried (not that any of them dared). I think she would have insisted that having children was a woman’s obligation, had one of them dared confide, as she unaccountably once confided in me, that she didn’t think she was “a natural mother.” Perhaps when she died in the year I was thirty-two, she held onto the hope that it was not too late for me. By then, though, she was burdened with sorrows and fears more immediate than her oldest granddaughter’s straying from the path of duty, and we hadn’t seen each other enough to talk in the way we had when I was a child. And so, I remain free to imagine that if she’d lived longer, she would have, even if secretly, felt a germ of joy take root at the thought that I have lived not according to a sense of duty but by allegiance to another principle, a sense that neither fitness nor desire equipped me to be someone’s mother.  

The ruby ring came to rest in my jewelry box long ago, no less cherished than ever, but less and less harmonious with my adult sense of myself. It has come to fit my adult hand as it once fit hers, on a pinky finger only, and I’ve worried that its topknot will snag something and one of the soft and delicate prongs that hold the stones will bend or break. Now, when I slide it past the knuckle to the base of my finger, where it is loose enough to twist around freely, it looks like a child’s ring on a grandmother’s hand, as if I’m still the one playing dress-up with someone else’s finery. Except now time has played a dirty trick and switched our bodies, so that in this game of trying on costumes to see how we look as someone else, I can see that my grandmother’s ring, though it is mine now, does not suit me after all, nor bind me to the person she and I once imagined I would have to be.

Jennifer Brown (she/her) lives with her partner and a funny-looking dog in Montpelier, Vermont, on unceded Abenaki land. Formerly (and again in the near future) a teacher, currently a part-timer at Hunger Mountain Co-op, she dabbles in bookbinding, sewing, baking, birdwatching, drawing, Abenaki, knitting, and gardening, in addition to writing poetry and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, The Orison Anthology, Cimarron Review, Zone 3, Twyckenham Notes, and Cincinnati Review. Her first poetry collection, Natural Violence, was published in 2022 by Brick Road Poetry Press.

Knock knock knock!

“Helloooo?”

I know that voice. Her bony-fingered tap. I tiptoe to the door and stretch myself up to see through the peephole. No breathing allowed—too noisy. I remove my leopard-print slippers in slow motion to avoid that scuttle sound and clutch my long skirt with one hand between my legs to prevent any minute movement noise from giving away my coordinates.

I’m not home. That’s my story.

Fuck, I never should have given her my address. She’s done this before. I was just about to boil water for my lentils, too. Good thing I didn’t. Boiling water and the scent of cumin and bay leaf—dead giveaway.

This is precisely why I don’t want to live in a stand-alone house. I thank my past self for choosing to live in an apartment that requires a key fob at every door, stairwell, and elevator. “It’s like trying to breach Alcatraz,” I often joke to friends and delivery people.

Annoying neighbors must’ve let her up. I bet she charmed them like she does everybody: free CDs or T-shirts or matches or frisbees or playing cards with her face on them. Everybody likes free shit.

“Great PR!” she always said.

My mother, Joanie, is a singer-songwriter. Country—or trying to be. Think Dolly Parton (minus the heart/mind of gold) crossed with former supermodel Janice Dickinson or a washed-up pageant queen. “The Straight Shot Gal” is her chosen moniker because she likes guns and shooting innocent birds from a distance. The NRA often invites her to their celebrity shooting events, not because she’s famous (despite her thinking everyone’s always bugging her for autographs) but because she makes large donations and flirts with rednecks.

I eye her through the peephole and take only quick, swooping laser glances in case she’s peering through the other side and might see shifts in light. Slow, warm, quiet out-breaths through the mouth.

I feel like both prey and hunter.

Her skin looks tawny-orange—the sun was never enough for her so hyper-2000s-style spray tans are always a go. Spaghetti straps, bra-top, boulder-tits out, bullet nipples shooting out like threats because she should have listened to her surgeon and gone with a C-cup instead. And I know she’s probably wearing a skirt far too short. The ones girls wear in middle school when they begin their tragic thigh-gap obsessions. And I know she’s wearing heels—always—despite having the most fucked up toes—like the mangled curly fries she’d scarf down and puke up after family dinner around the TV. Over four of them have metal rods in place due to fractures from drugged/drunken stumbling. Such carelessness always paid off for her in the form of post-op pills.

I think I can smell her makeup through the door. Knockoff Bobbi Brown or Mary Kay or shit she got from an infomercial at 4 a.m. that nobody should waste money on. It’s not even her money. She’s already blown through the multi-million-dollar divorce settlement on luxury getaways to Switzerland and elsewhere to score cheaper prescription drugs since all the local CVS and Walgreens pharmacies know to turn her away.       

Sylvio thinks it’s playtime and starts meowing—damn my adorable little Pinto Bean. But my story still stands: of course, Sylvio’s home but I’m not. Her ears are turned in the direction of the door. She hears more than I do and can probably smell her Thierry Mugler Angel perfume and/or Chanel N˚5 layered in alternating wafts. She knows I’m trying to be quiet, but, being a cat, she naturally has this “Fuck you imma meow anyway” thing going on.

My phone starts to buzz and sound that stupid Parisian twinkle tone—thank god it’s lost somewhere in the madness of my bedsheets. I don’t dare even enter the bedroom as if any disruption of vibrations could send her senses some signal of human life within my apartment. My “story” is, however, that I left my phone at home. I often do this anyway as an escape so it’s legit.

I hear her leave me a message through the door.

“BB, it’s Mumu—Mommy—your mother. Ahhmmmmm, I’m here. Outside your door! In town for a songwriters’ meeting and you ought to go. Ya know, just creatives all around—totally up your alley. Managers, producers, just thought we could go as a mother-daughter team. Pitch our movie—”

She has some fantasy of us being a mother-daughter acting team like Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson.

“Jack Nicholson’s still on board!”

This is pure hogwash, sheer hallucination, her girlish dreams of stardom—she says things like this a lot. Like when I receive texts at 4 a.m. saying that she’s “hand-delivering her famous meatloaf to the White House for Trump.”

Gross on so many levels.

“I have a package for you but don’t want to leave it out here—confidential ya know—my new singles and some knick-knacks.”

Every year, for every holiday, she sends me at least twenty of her CDs, both old and new, as if I’m going to pass them out like she used to pay me to do in Nashville when I was ten. Usually, the newer CDs are different combinations of old, recycled songs she recorded ten years ago but with photos of her newly reconstructed face and tits. Her repurposed plastic identity sounds the same.

As to the “confidential” part: someone’s always stealing her song ideas. She went on regular rants about single words being “stolen” from her; anyone using the word “You” in a song title counted as direct copyright infringement worthy of her team of creative lawyers, who I’m not even sure were ever actual lawyers.

“Hope to see you, little one! You are my daughter. I am your mother.”

Biological fact, so who is she trying to convince? Herself?

“I think I deserve to see you every so often.” Deserve? As if I am property she bought twenty-eight years ago with posted signage that she and only she “deserves” to smear herself over me like a preschooler making finger paint mud on the mirror? Her voice starts to crack like it always does when she’s going to cry.

“Hate to cry but you know me—” Oh, I know, she always got to cry more than I did. I was the mom, she was the child.

I flash back to the lobby of the Embassy Suites was at full capacity—Fan Fair, the quintessential country music festival in Nashville. She’d been signing autographs and taking pictures with adoring fans all day. Most had never heard of “Joanie Ray” or “The Straight Shot Gal,” but those few podunk rednecks who had seemed bafflingly honored to be in her presence. Especially middle-aged or older, married, or recently divorced men who always held her hug a little too long and close. Those bullet nipples.

Despite my punk-pre-teen sass (and my hatred for country music), I was proud to be the daughter of such a beautiful woman with whom everybody seemed to fall in love. And it made me happy to see her smile, in her element, being adored. Even if she later bitched about all the “creepy” men with their “fatass wives.”

Then the night. The hotel room was cramped with boxes of merchandise, CDs, and her three necessary suitcases of outfits and shoes. Dust particles from the shoddy AC—either too hot or too cold—wafted against the yellow, stagnant light. She was already mid-way through a bottle of Don Julio tequila, mascara blotching her under-eyes and fake lashes peeling off from the corners.

“I just don’t know what to do next—it’s just not good—I can’t do this anymore—do you think I’m good? My music?” She pleaded and poured two shots of tequila, pushing the latter toward me on the coffee table.

“Well, you can write,” I replied with as much confidence as a tween can summon. “You can play any instrument that’s put in front of you.” Who was this woman, this dribbling mess? Every day, I seemed to get a new version of her, and within those versions were several distinct flavors. This one: the poor, poor misunderstood artist victim who needed the perfect blueprint of a best friend and cheerleader. I summoned up the best solid voice I could muster, ones I’d heard on TV in shows like Seventh Heaven or The Brady Bunch in their tender moments. “I’m proud of you, Mommy.” Was I? Was I convincing enough? I downed the shot before retrieving more tissues from the bathroom.

I zip back to the present, tiptoe to my bedroom, and stare at the closet door, which hides boxes of various sizes. I receive random packages from her all the time. On top of CDs, there are multiple photos of her, signed and dated like I’m part of the fan club; also included are toiletries from various luxury hotels in Nashville, New York, LA, Switzerland, or elsewhere in Europe. My personal favorite is a lanyard from the 2012 Grammys with Barbara Streisand’s face on it signed “Joanie Ray, Straight Shot Gal”—can’t make this shit up. To top it off, there’s almost always a card having to do with Jesus or guns or the fact that I am, indeed, her daughter. Yes, I know. Biology.

Here’s the heated chunk of my fantasy mother-daughter therapy session that I tried to make happen so many times:

Joanie: “I’m the mom, you’re the daughter.” (Her classic line.)

Brandy: “Ha! Never felt that way for me growing up. I was your little side project. I had to reflect back to you the best version of whatever you wanted or needed—which I also had to figure out by some magic of adolescent emotional intellect—on any given day. I took care of you, like when you’d pass out on the couch drunk or high on meds—I’d leave four Advils, two cups of water, saltines, and a note that said ‘Dr. B’s elixir’—this was 2 a.m. on fucking school nights. Let’s not forget the time—”

J: “Not true. You must be thinking of your father. Who brainwashed you to believe that?”

B: “My memories, my intellect, brainwashing? As if I’m incapable of logical thought? Are you fucking kidding?”

J: “You’re such a good little actress—” (Her signature passive-aggressive tone.)

B: “Oh, that classic line. I say something true that goes against your precious little ‘perfect Mom’ fantasy identity, and I must be brainwashed or acting.”

I threw a chair at her once. And a knife. It had to do with her making out with Michael Harner at my sister’s party she threw in the cabaña the prior weekend. We were in high school at the time. Nic was a senior, and I was a freshman. Joanie came into the cabaña wearing nothing but a see-through white robe, loosely tied at the waist with a lacy white thong underneath. We were listening to Mike Jones and rich, white-kid dancing (i.e., shittily crip walking like we knew how or what it meant). When she waltzed in, every teenage mouth dropped. Drinks were poured, and she had some shots with a group of the hottest lacrosse players. She started singing “Margaritaville.”

Thirty minutes and an empty shot glass later, I turned to see her ear-deep in Michael Harner’s face.

A few days later, after school, I was chopping some carrots and celery for a snack, and she stormed into the kitchen, raging about how someone had stolen her diamond necklace and Vicodin and accusing one of Nic’s friends.

“I just KNOW it was Wendy, her mother was always SO jealous of me!” She hissed, slamming random items onto the counter for emphasis. “She wanted your father’s money, she’s a hooker!”

“Mom, please stop.”

“Oh, was it Bridget? Was Bridget there?” She and Bridget had had lengthy chats (probably about overpriced designer shoes or an article from Cosmopolitan magazine) and taken shots together but, of course, she didn’t remember.

“Mom, your necklace is probably on your bathroom counter in that bin—or in the one in the left drawer.” She’d pulled this “someone-stole-my-____” thing so many times.

“Did you check?” I tried to calm the raging toddler. “And nobody was near your pills or even in the main house—you probably took more than you’re supposed to. Like you always do.” Oops, I knew better than to throw a match at a dragon.

“That necklace is worth 20,000 dollars! Brat!” She’d steamed up. “YOU took my pills!” She dug around in a drawer of napkins, slamming more items around, then came at me and shoved me with her whole body, “BRAT! DRUG ADDICT!” My hip rammed into the handle on the oven, which came loose at one end.

No words—I lost my shit at this point. I threw the knife down, cutting the side of my right foot, picked it up again, and launched it at her. The handle hit her left thigh. Hoisted a bar stool. Heaved it. The carrots. An idle fork. By this point, she’d retreated toward the pantry. The whole time she was shouting. Bitch, brat, whore, addict, I have no idea, but it was a mix of a lot of things, and I just wanted to stop up the hole in her face with anything I could grab like it was a black hole trying to suck me in.

“You have lost it!” She came at me again, grabbing my forearms. “SPOILED FUCKING BITCH!”

I had zero control over my body. But I now felt steaming hot and just cried and screamed, hoping Esperanza, our maid, or Pilar, our other maid, or Ángel, whom my parents called the “yardman” (but whom I called Ángel out of respect for his being mi papa segundo) would rush in and stop this.

I broke free. She left. I just sat. Crying and sweating from my elbows, the backs of my knees, between my toes. The thin red slash on my foot. The knife was still on the floor, at a 30˚ angle with the side of one of the tiles. The bottom leg-chunk of the stool had come off. No idea if I hit her with the chair or not. And the fork was not in sight. Everything was wavy through underwater eyes.

I recall getting the superglue out of the drawer by the phone—the one with all the alligator clips, post-its, soy sauce packets, and restaurant mints. My snot flooded my mouth and chin and wet my shirt. I glued the chair leg back on but didn’t have the strength to sit there and hold it together for two minutes, so it kept falling, and I let it. I’ll fix it later, I thought.

Fantasy convo:

B: “Remember when you played the piano when I was a tiny tot—four or seven or something—you’d play some classical piece and I’d dance all ballet-y and then you’d splice it with ragtime or high-octane jumpiness and I’d dance around like there was a celebratory fire pit on that priceless Persian rug in the living room. Remember that? Rossini’s ‘William Tell’ Overture.”

J: “You were so funny!”

B: “Or when you’d cook, like, once a year, and I’d always want to pound the meat because it was an opportunity to make noise and sing and dance? ‘Blue Danube’ Waltz, by Strauss! Dada da da da—*SMACK SMACK, POUND POUND*—da da da da daaaa—*WHACK WHACK, WHACK WHACK*—hahaha!”

J: “Don’t forget ‘New York, New York’—you’d be doing little high kicks throughout the house and especially whenever you entered a room just to say ‘I’m HERE! Bah bah BAHDAHDAH, Bah Bah BADDAHDAH!’ We knew you’d be an incredible actress!”

She sent me a book about five years ago. How to Forgive When You Don’t Feel Like It, which is comprised of Bible verses and commentary from TV priests, pastors, and other religious nuts that likely do it for the attention and the tax break. She’d signed the title page: “I forgive YOU, Joanie Ray” in that same decades-old signature I’ve seen a billion times on CDs and posters. I can replicate it with my eyes closed.

But she’s never said she’s sorry. Not once. Except in the form of “I’m sorry YOU feel that way,” a textbook narcissist quip to deflect blame back onto the other person. She had a drawer full of manipulation tools to make others feel as though they’ve pissed on her parade. And I did piss on her parade, a lot. Over the years, I’d apologized a billion times for this and that. Even the chair, the knife, my temper, my “please stop texting me” texts, all of it.

I’ve asked for reciprocal apologies with the help of so many therapists, but each letter I’ve poured over, cried on, and finally mustered the courage to send gets sideswiped into that ever-present black hole set up to protect the fortress of her ego.

Whose ego? I’m still trying to paint a healthy ego into my own identity to displace the toxic selves—and all their chaos—I had etched upon me. Still, her false selves I wore like resin probably offered some layer of protection. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have seen the truth of her: she never wanted to be a mother. I was a happenstance—a tool she could use to paint her own version of reality.

She’s left my door. But she’s still in Austin. I turn my phone off. When I turn it on at 3 a.m., I see a flood of texts. I don’t open any of them, not even ones from friends. But I see one headline, second from the top. It’s from my apartment building’s automated robot: “You have a package.” I pick it up the next day so their mailroom isn’t overburdened and put it in my closet under haphazardly folded bedsheets. I’ll open it later.

Brandyce Ingram is a writer, tutor, and jazz-head in Seattle, Washington. Her work has appeared in High Shelf, Willowdown Books, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, An Evening with Emily Dickinson (Wingless Dreamer), and elsewhere. Her latest search history includes “twentieth-century lunatic asylums women” and “Jung Red Book illustrations.”

Sunday mornings Jimmy Corcoran and I ran the Herald Tribune and New York Times off a jeep along the leafy streets of Glen Ridge, Montclair, and Upper Montclair. We had one hundred and fifty, two hundred papers stacked up in the jeep. The driver would slow, we’d grab three or four papers, jump off, run, throw the papers on porches, run to the gliding jeep, grab another bunch, run, toss, run through a whole neighborhood, then hop on the jeep’s running boards, and shoot off to another neighborhood.  

The higher up you got on New Jersey’s Watchung rise, the bigger the houses. Up top were mansions on palatial lawns with curving driveways and arched porticos. One time the driver pointed and told us, “That big house belongs to Yogi Berra.”

We learned quickly enough how to exit a moving jeep. Jump in the direction the jeep’s going, one foot, then the other, and you’re running. Any other way you’re flat on your face.

The driver of the jeep was a postal worker and World War II veteran. This was his weekend gig. On lonely stretches, no cops around, he let Cork try driving. I sat on the hood of the jeep while Corcoran ground gears and popped the clutch.

We began around four in the morning. I’d walk from home up the Lackawanna tracks to the paper office at the back of the railroad station. The papers were delivered in the middle of the night in sections like sports, business, news. We put the sections in stacks along the wooden tables that lined the walls of the office. Then we’d build each paper backwards, starting with the inner sections and finishing with the front-page. This was called subbing. After a couple hours subbing, off we went to the neighborhoods in the jeep.

One night, Cork and I were walking back from the movies in Bloomfield Center. Passing a nightclub on Bloomfield Avenue: Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Men and women streamed out of the joint, jostled past us onto the sidewalk to the parking lot—all looking urgent and scared. Then a guy holding his stomach was half carried, half dragged by two men down the steps of the bar and up the street. One of the men had a revolver stuck in his belt.

This was something, a story to tell! “You see that fucking guy, Cranse? Blood, Jesus Christ, shot in the fucking belly. Fuck me.”

Like a lot of working-class Catholic kids, Cork went to Sacred Heart through eighth grade, then came to our high school. Cork was tall, lanky, swore like an adult, and busted chops. His father was a fireman, my father a teacher. In school, I was in college prep, Cork was in the vocational track—although I suspect he was probably smarter than me. I became class-conscious at a tender age, learning to cuss like Corcoran, although I could never bust chops.

We were twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. School was school; most of that crap you forgot anyway. Long echoing hallways, lockers, blackboards, johns down in the basement, grades that told you how smart or stupid you were. School, an enclosed world unto itself, a place where you were herded and hushed and judged. “Open to page 58”—you go into a haze.  

But running off that jeep: Freedom! That was more like it! Breathing deep, freezing in winter, cool on summer mornings, we’d jump onto the running board, run to the quiet houses and mansions, throw the Trib, the Times, run back. I felt the world opening up, something out there besides endless freaking school.  

I actually did go to college, and I loved it. Cork went into the Marine Corps and learned about jet engines. I took up teaching and said to hell with grades; put in an earnest effort and you get an “A.” Cork made a career in the airlines, rising up the ranks. At the end of the day, he pulled in a hell of a lot more money than I’ll ever see.  

Now, these latter days, when I go out for a jog, I dream of the jeep, Cork and me, running, tossing, running, running.

The poet Tracy Dimond with an Estonian flag near her Baltimore rowhouse upon returning from Tallinn.

Photo Credit: Jennifer Bishop

In the mid-to-late 1950s, my grandparents had a boarder in their East Baltimore rowhouse named “Miss Karen,” a thin, elderly woman from Estonia. I never knew her last name and the people who could tell me are long dead.

A thousand or more Estonian families lived in Baltimore after the refugee crisis that followed World War II. Household census details that could tell me more about Miss Karen when she lived on Macon Street won’t be available for a few more years.

Miss Karen was one of my grandmother’s “lady friends” and visited now and then after moving away. She would drop by when I spent weekends with Grandmom and Grandpop. I might have been six or seven. With her pinched face and rimless spectacles, she reminded me of Granny from the Beverly Hillbillies.

She chain smoked, nothing odd back then. But the way she drank coffee was something to see. She sipped hers from a one-and-a-half pint blue Pyrex mixing bowl, using two hands to bring it to her lips. I wasn’t much taller than the table and stood nearby, fascinated.

Every Christmas, Miss Karen would give me, my brother Danny and my cousin Donna two Hershey bars wrapped in ribbon, sometimes with a dollar. I don’t recall many presents from Santa in those days but I’ll never forget Miss Karen’s Hershey bars.

The story the grown-ups told after the Sunday dinner table was cleared for coffee, cake, and Spanish anis del mono was that Miss Karen had been wealthy in Estonia before World War II, fleeing her homeland after the war when the Communists took over.

Which is likely how, while eavesdropping on “the grown-ups”—my favorite childhood pastime, the foundation of my future career—I got the idea that she’d been rich herself and lost everything. Only part of that was true. She did lose everything.

“She cooked for a wealthy family over there and came to America through some sort of association,” said Victor Alvarez, my uncle, born in late November, 1935, and now living on the Eastern Shore. “When she got to Baltimore she cooked for another rich family.”

And when she landed on Macon Street, two blocks south of Eastern Avenue in what was then an Italian, German, and Polish neighborhood and is now Greek and Hispanic, she kept cooking.

Miss Karen eventually settled in as something between a distant relative and a busybody, “roaming the whole house,” according to Uncle Victor.

“She cooked for us just about every day, stayed for quite a while. I was still in high school,” he said. “She took meals with us though I don’t think my mother was too happy about that but they did show each other how to prepare different things.”

Miss Karen had the second-floor rear bedroom overlooking the alley separating Macon Street from Newkirk Street a block to the east. It was once the bedroom of Uncle Victor and my father Manuel, born in 1934 and dying in 2021.

Before Miss Karen, the room belonged to my grandfather’s seafaring brother Basilio Alvarez Viega. My grandfather dropped his mother’s name after coming to Baltimore around 1925. The room is now painted orange and black and holds my memorabilia of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team.

Miss Karen arrived sometime after Tio Basilio returned to Spain in 1948. When she did, she had the use of a ’48 Westinghouse refrigerator that Basilio bought my grandparents to thank them for their kindness. It weighed some 300 pounds and lasted more than sixty years.

           1948 Alvarez family refrigerator as rendered by the artist Billy Ray Gombus

          Photo credit: Macon Street Books 

When the beast finally gave way, it had to be cut up to get it out of the basement kitchen. The one I replaced it with from Best Buy lasted ten minutes after the warranty ran out. I was so angry that I went for several years without a refrigerator.

From my grandparents’ house in what is now Greektown, Miss Karen would have walked a few blocks to the north side of Eastern Avenue and the basement of a bar near Oldham and Portugal streets. That’s where early meetings of the Baltimore Estonian Society, founded in 1936, were held.

There, she likely crossed paths with the families of the former Mary Ann Tuur and her husband, Peter Saar, a Homeland couple involved all their lives with all things Estonian.

           Peter and Mary Ann Saar on a visit to the former Estonian House, now a Christian church. Peter holds an engraved wooden beer tankard, an object found in many Estonian homes. Mary Ann with doll wearing Estonian folk dress from the island of Muhu, the island where her father was born. Her mother was from the town of Valga, near Latvia.

           Photo Credit: Jennifer Bishop

I don’t know how Miss Karen made it from Estonia (which declared neutrality in vain at the start of World War II) to Baltimore. It likely mirrored the arduous journey of a quite young Mary Ann and her parents.

The Tuur family arrived in Baltimore on June 1, 1950 (the same year Peter’s father landed) after five years of countless stops, several trains, a ship and, at times, on foot.

“We were on the roads near Austria when planes were dropping bombs,” she remembered, not sure if the aircraft were Allies or Axis. “We dove into a pig sty to take shelter.”

Born Mare Tuur in December 1940 in the Estonian capital of Tallinn—six months into the Soviet occupation—Mary Ann was a year old when Nazi Germany forced the Russians out. She was almost four when the family fled.

Had they not, her father—the agronomist Alexander Tuur—would likely have been executed as an official of the Estonian government. Along with her mother, the former Anna A. Rausk, the Tuurs were on the island Saaremaa, the largest of the country’s more than 2,000 islands. Alexander had been tasked with rounding up Estonian breed horses—all-purpose work animals known as “Tori”—for safekeeping.

”In September of 1944, we took a German troop ship from the island of Saaremaa to what is now Gdynia” in Poland, said Mary Ann, noting there were no soldiers on board. Two days later, they boarded a train for a refugee camp near Frankfurt an der Oder. On October 3, they left Germany for Braunau, Austria, and a displaced persons camp near Linz.

For several years after the end of the war in 1945, the Tuurs were part of approximately 850,000 Europeans—Jews, Greeks, Russians, Hungarians, and others along with Estonians—living in displaced persons camps.

“I have a lot of good memories from the camps with other Estonians and other nationalities,” said Mary Ann. “We got along and we played—kids are kids.”

On May 9, 1949, they left Bremerhaven on the American troop transport Marine Marlin, which was later sunk in Quy Nhon harbor by the North Vietnamese in 1971, arriving in New York City after a week at sea.

Sponsored by a New Hampshire farmer, they were soon living on a dairy farm in Walpole.  “I didn’t know a word of English,” said Mary Ann, who was placed in the first grade at age eight and skipped to the fifth after learning the language.

“My parents knew several Estonian families in Baltimore, that’s why we came here,” said Mary Ann, noting that their first apartment was a block north of Pennsylvania Station on St. Paul street.

There was no enclave of Estonians in Baltimore similar to Little Italy or the nineteenth century concentration of Irish near the B&O yards on West Pratt Street. And no ethnic restaurant—like the long-closed Eichenkranz or the recently closed Ikaros—for old country staples like the rustic porridge Mulgipuder.

They had to make it at home or hope it was on the menu—perhaps accompanying pork roast with boiled potatoes and carrots—at an event at the Estonian House near the corner of East North Avenue and Belair Road.

“Estonians in Baltimore were scattered,” said Peter, born at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951, the son of  Ludvig Saar, a merchant seamen who worked here as a carpenter and cabinet maker. His mother was the former Margo Hallman, who retired as a Pratt Library bookbinder in 1982.

“My father was Lutheran and a lot of Baltimore Estonians worshiped at St. Mark’s on St. Paul Street,” he said, noting no central place of worship. “Mary Ann’s parents were Eastern Orthodox.”  As of 2021, nearly 60 percent of native Estonians said they observed no religion.

Peter and Mary Ann met in late summer 1975 in Lakewood, N.J. where Estonians from across the United States gathered to practice folk dance for the upcoming “Esto ’76” in Baltimore. Each showed up without a partner. Peter’s dance partner had gone to Toronto to get married and Mary Ann’s cohort joined the military.

“I wasn’t giving up on taking part and Mary Ann was also determined to participate,” said Peter. “One of the organizers came by and said, ‘You two are now a couple.’”

A year later—Baltimore’s bi-centennial summer of the Tall Ships—they were ready to perform the Tuljak dance at Memorial Stadium in a week-long festival that drew more than 13,000 Estonians from around the world. And brought heavy rains.

Police helped scores of Estonians find their way to the 33rd street stadium, Teamster brewery truck drivers were on strike, and Peter and Mary Ann joined 700 other couples keeping the spirit of the old country alive.

“The women were in wool skirts and linen blouses and just as we were about to start the big dance —the finale—a thunderstorm rolls in,” said Peter. “Lightning and heavy rain. All of the dancers were soaked and everyone said, ‘Let’s keep going.’ That's the spirit of Estonia, we carry on.”

As did Peter and Mary Ann, married a decade later.

           Peter and Mary Ann Saar in front of Estonian House. The early twentieth-century building near the corner of Belair Road and East North Avenue was Baltimore’s “Eesti Maja” from 1963 through 2018.

           Photo Credit: Jennifer Bishop

In July 2023, Baltimore poet and long distance runner Tracy Dimond was eating blood sausage (verivorst), with dark rye bread, sauerkraut, and pickles in Tallinn, an extraordinarily preserved medieval city of 425,000 in a country of 1.33 million—the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined.

“Lots of sauerkraut,” said the Pigtown resident. “Lots of pickles.” And a rhubarb soda wherever she could find one.

Once the province of wealthy German merchants in the Middle Ages, Tallinn has become one of the twenty-first century’s great cities of the arts. “Art everywhere,” said Dimond,  who spent nine days in Estonia visiting friends from Baltimore and before the trip “didn’t know a thing about the country.”

The arts district—galleries, start-ups, small shops and an ice cream factory—is Telliskivi Loomelinnak (“creative city”), founded in a former industrial area in 2007. It is anchored by the Fotografiska Tallinn Photography Museum, which Dimond visited several times when not biking around Old Town or running along the bay of Tallinn, “just a block from my friends’ front door.”

She took a two hour ferry ride across the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki, ate locally sourced kale and mozzarella, and came home with a sense that artists, both established and emerging,  receive more support in the northern European republic—than in the United States. Which seems to have been the case forever.

Unlike Baltimore, she said—where it can be hard for people to get around and feel safe doing it—getting from here to there in Tallinn was not only convenient but comfortable. “The city has done so much to make the space livable, even people in wheelchairs can enjoy the waterfront.”

And something more, something no metropolis can duplicate if it’s not already there: the stunning Baltic sky.

“I don't know what it was, maybe because it stays light out so long,” said Dimond, “But it just seemed more blue.”

           Mary Ann Saar on the front porch of Power House World Ministries with Bishop James A. Winslow, Jr., to whom the Estonian Society sold the property in 2018.

            Photo Credit: Jennifer Bishop

The wide, three story Formstone building at 1932 Belair Road in the shadow of Baltimore Cemetery was built in 1920. The Baltimore Estonian Society bought it in 1963 from the Collington Pleasure Club, which began as a neighborhood baseball team in 1901 largely made up of German-Americans. Their home games were played at Yokel's Park near the Brooklyn (Baltimore) end of the old Light Street Bridge and their clubhouse sported oysters roasts and pinochle tournaments.

Things were a little different when the Estonians took over near the end of the Kennedy Administration and the building became “Eesti Maj”—the Estonian House complete with grand piano, commercial kitchen, and a bandstand.

The entrance is now protected by a thick metal grate and a sign that says PowerHouse World Ministries, pastored by the kindly Bishop James A. Winslow, Jr.

“We had many parties there, sometimes they lasted all night. I was the last one to close the door on the Estonian House,” said Peter of the 2018 sale. “There was no final party, just an auction of things with sentimental value.”

About 150 Estonian-Americans still live in the Baltimore metro area with much greater numbers in suburban Washington, D.C., and Toronto.

“The [original] immigrants had become older and frail and didn’t want to come down anymore,” said Peter. “The third generation has to be taught what the idea of Estonia is.”

Peter was born into the depths of the culture. His father Ludvig, who helped renovate the building when purchased from the Collington club, was a baritone in the society’s choir—the “meeskoor.” He drafted Peter, then a teenager, into the group. One night after practice, sometime in the late 1960s, the evening ended with a bang.

Verner Johannes Jürmann (1898-1986), a physician born in the southeastern Estonian town of Tartu, was always quick to head home after the last note. Once, said Peter, “he rushed back in saying he’d been shot.”

 A man had accosted the doctor at the door to his car and tried to rob him with a small caliber pistol.  When the 70-something Jürmann resisted, the man shot him.

 “He was holding a thick binder of Estonian music in front of his chest,” said Peter of the unreported incident. “It saved his life.”

Verner continued to attend choir practice with the stoicism and persistence that has carried Estonians through centuries of occupations and reclamations. The nation declared independence in 1918 and regained it in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The year after, Peter Saar visited Estonia—where his uncle still lived on Saaremaa—to see what might come to pass with the Russians gone. Except they were still there.

“It was still occupied by Soviet troops who had not yet been directed to leave,” said Saar.   “My uncle and I walked several yards down a gap in the fence. He said locals walked through to sell fruit and vegetables to the troops. He pointed out where our house had stood. I started taking pictures when we heard the sound of many people running toward us across the gravel.”

They were surrounded, he said, “by a dozen short Soviet soldiers in uniform with automatic weapons, none of them more than five feet tall. Strolling behind them was their commanding officer, a six-foot-three Ukrainian.”

The leader recognized Saar’s uncle and asked what was going on. After we explained, he told his men to lower their weapons and relax. Photos would be fine, the commander said, but only around the homestead and not of any military equipment or a radar station above the treetops.

Six years later, Saar said, “I received official notice that the property—about five acres—returned to my control. I also was invoiced for property taxes.” A circle nearly sixty years in the making had been closed.

Rafael Alvarez is the author of the Orlo and Leini tales set in twentieth-century, ethnic East Baltimore. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com.

Photo Credit: Jennifer Bishop