Thunderbirds -- Jane's Journal

November 27, 2003 Day 100

I had done a little digging and found out that Roger had gotten a part in one of those seasonal productions of A Christmas Carol. Thanksgiving weekend was their big kickoff and so, with the coast as clear as it was going to get, I packed up and headed to see my family.

Mom and my sister-in-law Audrey had been switching between hosting the last few years. Since Audrey had given birth to twins in June and now had a pair of five-month-olds to deal with in addition to the two girls she and Mitch already had, not to mention returning to work, Mom had insisted on doing everything herself. I was glad I had shown up a few days early to help her out.

At 73 my mother probably should have been expected to be slowing down somewhat, and maybe some people would. But not Marybeth. She was made of stronger stuff than that. Even as she aged now I was still in awe of her.

I may have discovered my love of storytelling early on but there had never been any doubt in my mind who I acquired it from. My mother had had little to offer me in the way of immediate family but had made up with it with constant stories from her childhood, repeating her memories for me over and over until they were so much a part of my own consciousness they could have been my memories. She was born in Manchester, England in 1931, and the rough luck that was to come to the area dramatically changed my mother's life. She had a brother, Vincent, who was four years older than her but when she was two he had died from a particularly nasty case of measles. When the war had begun to rumble in the distance her father, a surgeon, had enlisted almost immediately. My mother said that her father, my grandfather, Norman Butler, had been a very kind man, the type that would go out of his way for strangers. No one was surprised when he stepped up to volunteer. My mother had been very close to him, and she was heartbroken when he left, and so was her mother, but they had soldiered on and tried to be brave, waiting for the day they would all be reunited. The war had other plans, however.

As an important industrial center and port, Manchester was a tempting target for the Germans. In an attempt to protect the cities children, thousands of them were evacuated in 1939 and my mother was sent to live with a host family in Blackpool. My grandmother chose to stay behind, both to help care for my grandfather's parents and to remain close to home and her memories of her son. They, along with my Uncle Lewis, Norman's brother, who had been illegible to serve due to severe asthma, were all killed in the Christmas Blitz in 1940. Not wanting to risk losing the only family he had left, my grandfather made the decision to send my mother to the US, to stay with her Aunt Carys and grandmother, Jane, the one I would come to be named after. Carys had married an American soldier some years before and had moved back to his family farm with him. When he had died unexpectedly, leaving Carys with five children and farm to manage on her own, Grandmother Jane had come to stay with her to help her out.

The farm had weathered the depression better than most and by the time my mother had arrived there in early 1941 things were flourishing. She had said it had seemed like paradise to her, far removed from the gritty stone buildings she had grown up with in Manchester and tucked far away from the realities of rationing and air raid drills, and the dangers of the Luftwaffe. She had walked around in a daze for a while but had started to settle in when news came that her father had been killed in the fighting in North Africa. Aunty Carys had simply said it was a good thing she was already there, had tucked her in with her own children and they had all gone on with a sort of practical determination that marked the women in my family. I had been raised on their stories and I had always felt a bit in awe of them, and not quite worthy of their legacy.

This year Aunt Carys came for the holidays along with her oldest son Archie and his family. She was 97 that year and still lived on that farm, although my cousin Archie's youngest son, David, ran it now. She had been like a grandmother to me in the absence of my own, and there was no telling how many more holidays, if any, I would have with her. I wasn't about to miss this one over a feud.

Being back in my childhood home when I had been so at sea turned out to be less comforting than I had hoped it would have been. Late November in Indiana is generally gray and cold, the more glamorous bits of fall long gone, and this year I felt the chill no matter how many bulky cardigans I threw on or how long I sat at my parent's fireplace. I had planned to stay through until Christmas while I obtained my TEFL certificate and returned to Africa to teach English. But at home I was too much in my own head, doubting every decision I had made, losing my sense of self as I ripped my personality apart at the seams and tried to build something better.

Aunt Carys, who had been skeptical of my excuses for Roger's absence to begin with, took me aside after the dinner cleanup to ask what was going on with me. My problems seemed too silly to confess to her. After all, at my age, she had been a widow with a houseful of hungry children and farm to carry through the Great Depression. No, I was definitely a full stop in the line of steadfast and tenacious Hughes women. Besides, she was 97 years old, she had married at 15 and from all accounts had never entertained thoughts of another man after her husband had died. She was from a different world. What could she possibly have to say to me? Try as I might to avoid her, however, she persisted, and I found myself telling her everything with a frankness that surprised even me. I didn't leave out even a single sordid detail, I told her things I hadn't told Mitch, or anyone for that matter.

Aunt Carys listened to me carefully. If anything I said shocked her, her face gave no indication. She simply smiled at me the same way she had my entire life, her face as serene as always if a bit more lined, her bright blue eyes following my every word. She waited for me to be done and then insisted I climb up into the seat next to her, where she wrapped her arms around me and pulled my head into her lap. I didn't cry, I don't think I had any more tears left at that point, to be honest, but these wounds didn't seem to be much less raw than when they had been inflicted, despite the growth I had otherwise made.

"Listen," she had said softly as she smoothed my wild hair the way she used to when I was small. The house was filled with people, all going about the motions of a shared holiday. The twins were fussy and Audrey had gone to nurse them to try to quiet them down but I could still hear their periodic cries and the sweet clear notes of the lullaby that Audrey was singing to him. My older nieces were playing Hi Ho! Cherry-O, which they had retrieved from the chest in my old room. I knew the board had a giant red Kool-aid ring in the center, where Roger had distractedly set his glass one rainy afternoon. My dad, Mitch, Archie and his sons were watching the football game. Mom was chatting with her cousins in the kitchen.

"Do you hear it?" Aunt Carys had asked after I had lain there so long my stomach full of mashed potatoes and dressing had nearly lulled me to sleep. I shook my head. I didn't understand what she was wanting me to listen for.

She had sighed before explaining herself. "Don't you hear how it stretches on?" She twisted a strand of my hair around her finger and I shifted so that I could look up at her. There was a dreamy look to her face, and for just a moment I could see young Carys behind the timeworn lines, the pretty young Welsh girl who had snuck out of her bedroom window at 15 to run off to another country with her sweetheart. "We've weathered a lot of storms, the people in this house. The ones before us too, and ones no longer with us. Those babes in arms in the next room, they'll weather their share too. But they're only storms, love. No matter how mightily they rage, they're only storms. In the end, we're still here, still standing. The storms aren't us. We're what endures. And what we leave for others, that's what endures when we've gone on ourselves. It's time to come in out of the storm now, Jane. And it's time to call Roger. I know you think you don't need him right now, and maybe you don't. But I'll wager he needs you. Don't leave him out the storm either. Leave something that endures."