New Ground

FAMILY New Ground Rhonda Strickland TO KEEP MY FATHER FROM TEARING THE TUBES out of his head, mom stayed awake all night. The Duke Medical Center surgeon said someone should. She insisted, and I let her. Really, though, I didn't want to see my father behaving like a baby, begging to go home, pulling at the plastic shunts that siphoned fluid from his brain. The neurologist didn't know if the operation would cure his forgetfulness , a confusion which caused a serious car crash four months earlier. The accident crushed mom's spleen, and broke her shoulder. Eighty-two years old, she'd barely survived. Now she had to survive this: sitting up all night with a husband who'd taken good care of her for sixty years, but lately couldn't even remember how to pay bills. Years ago, before she was treated for manic depression, she'd stay up all night with glee, for no good reason. At least, not any reason we could understand. Now, I was afraid sleeplessness might damage her frail health. But the next morning, when I picked her up, dad was finally sleeping, tubes in place, and she seemed fine—just a bit sad. A normal sadness, though, not the old kind, when her highs were followed by depressions. Lithium had grounded her. As I drove out of Durham, North Carolina toward their home in Asheville, she said little, sitting perfectly still, except for knotted fingers trembling in her lap. We reached the tobacco fields edging Raleigh, then passed a farmer burning piles of brush. She shifted slightly and watched. I worried about her silent fatigue. Then she turned her lithiumleveled head to me, and said as clearly as if she'd risen from a good night's sleep, "I used to go with my dad and help pile up branches, watch him burn the bushes right down to the dirt. The very earth got charred black. He'd get up in the morning and say, 'Got to go work the new ground/ and I'd go with him." We drove beyond the flaming field. Staring out her window, she said, "I've passedbrush fires a thousand times and never thought of that 'til now. Isn't that strange?" She shook her head at this cool mystery. I asked if she felt all right. 38 In a voice as firm and flat as the black fields, all her brambles burned away, she said matter-of-factly, "Of course." She smiled. "I'm fine." These days she was like a rock, something I could cling to, though my clinging days should have been over. When I was a child, her mood swings left mebewildered. Since lithium, she'dbecome the calm, centered mother I never had. I wondered if she missed who she used to be. Neither of us spoke, so I amused myself with a picture of her running after my granddad, dancing around the brush fires, her brain as bright as her blazing red hair, crazy chemicals fanning flames higher. Everyone loved her aliveness. Her flare drew people to her; scads of suitors came. My father said she flitted like a flirt, then finally gave into him. We turned into the driveway of their house, and I helped her out of the car. Arthritis made her lean heavily on me as we struggled up steps and inside. She headed straight for her room, to bed. Sitting at the kitchen table, I picked up her seven-day pillbox from its place next to the jelly jar she filled every morning with garden flowers. The jar had last week's roses, pink petals a bit brown around the edges. These bloomed every September, the season's last. I'd lived in Asheville since August. When mom and dad were well enough to go home and mend, I drove back to West Virginia, quit my teaching job without notice, packed up my apartment, and moved to North Carolina. As their only unmarried child with no children, I wasn't even asked, Ijust came. My older sister and her husband drove down for a few days. They cleaned our parents' surprisingly dirty house, then hurried back...