Ann Willow

“When I awoke that morning, I didn’t know I was pregnant. It makes sense, though, that the child growing within me would send up memories on light beams—illuminating relics of long-buried events whispering from the depths of our ancestral consciousness. Connecting us. And portending our trials to come. Thus, the survivor deep within me awoke from a primordial sleep, bonding with the baby and determined to save her from my fate.”

--Remembering Changes Everything, a memoir.

 

“Willow’s prose remains eloquent throughout even when describing raw, harrowing episodes . . . the author reveals herself as a strong woman who’s unwilling to succumb to her past . . .”

--Kirkus Review

When I was a kid, I wrote stories for my twin sister. We were young—seven, eight, nine years old. Even before I learned how to write, I’d pretend, scribbling on paper as I spoke aloud the stories I wanted to tell. So it was wonderful when I could finally put words on paper. I hid my stories from my mother though—stashed them in a hot-pink box with white polka dots and tied with a pink ribbon—because she tossed them in the trash whenever she found them. 

Such was my start as a writer.  

Later in life, I spent many years writing my big story, my first memoir, Remembering Changes Everything (formerly Aboveground: Remembering). And I hid it, too, and ran from it as well. Yet, the story would not let me go. From a typist to a salesperson, make-up consultant, realtor, cross-country truck driver, to a yoga teacher, reiki practitioner and substitute teacher of troubled teens (my favorite work), the writer in me relentlessly chased me. I wrote here and there for twenty-five years until I finally finished Remembering Changes Everything in early 2022.

I no longer hide my writing. I have won awards for excerpts and short stories from my memoirs, and recent publications of my stories can be seen in Parabola, Grande Dame Literary, and Tangled Locks literary journals. As a freelance writer, my special interest stories have appeared in several newspapers, writing about the lives of missing and murdered indigenous people and their families. My first memoir, Remembering Changes Everything, is scheduled for publication Spring 2024, followed soon thereafter by my second memoir, Seeking New Identities.

Whereas my books are serious, the one-act plays I've written tend to be humorous. I love making people laugh, to turn heated controversy into lighthearted farce, as in Truckin’ Through Snowstorms. Or finding a friend who understands a secret frowned upon by polite society, as in Improbable Encounter—which enjoyed a staged-reading at Cell Theatre in Albuquerque and full performance for eight runs at Santa Fe Playhouse. Last year, I had great fun writing Sarah’s Spirit (in only 8 hours!) for Durango Arts Center’s “24 Hour Theatre” in Durango Colorado. And George & Deborah was selected for FUSION Theatre’s 2023 “The NM Seven (Eight)” short play festival in Albuquerque.

As for the rest of my background . . .

My BA in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin enriched my curiosity in the development of culture, specifically cults and white supremacy groups—which I survived and escaped. Raised in the Chicago area under those sordid circumstances, I wandered until I found my true home, in the American Southwest. There, my writing is inspired by the mystical landscape, unique history, diverse peoples, and the sassy, creative teens I’ve tutored. My second home is in a secluded area of what was once called Indian Territory. The Choctaw descendants of those who walked the Trail of Tears are alive and well there, and kind and generous to everyone despite their suffering under colonialism. The landscape, as well, is profoundly beautiful and I sojourn there for sustenance and to write in the wilds of misty mountains.

That’s my story. What’s yours? and tell me, if you wish.

• Remembering Changes Everything – 1st book in Aboveground Series
  2023 Page Turner Awards, Writing Award Shortlist

• Seeking New Identities – 2nd book in Aboveground Series
  2023 Page Turner Awards, Mentorship Award Winner Year-long mentorship with Tracy Stewart of Freshly Press, Paris

• "Packing Up Grandma Elsa"
  Parabola Magazine, Ancestors:Volume 47, No. 2, Summer 2022
  Parabola.org

  “Um, Grandma?” I said, searching for an opening. I decided I’d better ask what I’d been wanting to ask, hoping she hadn’t closed her vault of secrets.

  “Ja,” she said, looking up from the box into which she’d tucked a wrapped plate—Ja, Swedish for yes, pronounced yaw in her sing-song Swedish accent.

  “Do you remember that song you tried to teach me when I was little?”

  “Song?” The vague way she said it, looking off toward the back porch, it was clear she knew exactly what song.

  “Yeah. It was in another language, not Swedish. Remember? You clapped your hands and you were so happy. Grandpa came up behind you and said, ‘Don’t teach her that stuff.’”

  She stopped wrapping dishes. I stopped, too. We looked at each other across the open box. I heard my heart beating in time with the ticking of the clock above the stove.

  “Grandma,” I finally said, “I know you must remember.”

  She sighed, “I can’t believe you remember that. You must have been yust three or four.”

  “Well?” I said.

  “Oh, Annie, all these questions,” she huffed.

  Pulling a dishtowel off her shoulder she’d been using as an oven mitt, she hobbled over to the stove to check on the chicken roasting for our supper. Then she limped back to the kitchen table, and using it for support she looked at me across the chasm of the open box. She hesitated, opened her mouth, closed it, and then said, “I don’t know what that language was. I yust know my mother knew some people who spoke it, I tink they were relations to her.”

  “How come you’ve never mentioned this?”

  Grandma’s arms trembled from the effort of standing without her walker, so I moved the box off the kitchen table and dragged over the red vinyl chairs, placing them so we’d face each other.

  “When I was a child, we were visited by people dressed in strange clothes, and spoke that strange language.”

  “Wow! How old were you?”

  “Well, let me tink . . . I was about seven or eight. 1902, 03.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “I remember best the toes of their shoes; they were funny looking, curled up at the ends. Their pants were made of some kind of animal skin, and their yackets were embroidered and flared out.” She placed her hands at her waist and drew them down at an angle. “To me, those men looked like tomtar—”

  “Tome-tar?”

  “Ja,” she said, “Swedish tricksters, kind of like what you would call elves, only man size.” She smiled, eyes sparkling, moist with tears that didn’t spill. “I was so surprised to hear my mother speak with them in a language that was not Swedish. They came to our little village of Trädet in the winter. On a sled pulled by dogs. My parents seemed not to want them there.”

  “Why?” I interjected, enthralled.

  “I don’t know. My mother only said they were from the far north, but wouldn’t say more. A few weeks later, she sat down with me when we were alone in the house and taught me that song, telling me to never talk about it or tell anyone. It was our little secret.

  “I liked those people of the north. I knew they were my relations. That language they spoke, it was like music,” she said, her smile dreamlike, ethereal.

  “Why did Grandpa tell you not to teach me ‘that stuff?” I remembered the shame I’d felt, though I didn’t understand why. I simply knew that song was forbidden.

  “I don’t know,” she said abruptly, with a firmness I’d learned meant to ask no more.

  So, I asked no more. I’d also learned if I waited, she might say more.

  We finished wrapping up plates and glasses and moved on to Grandma’s beautiful, gold rimmed cups and saucers.

  “Are you sure you’re telling me everything, Gran? Who were those people? I want to know where you come from. Where I come from.” It was the first time I’d acknowledged, even to myself, my curiosity, my longing to know my Scandinavian roots.

  “I told you all I know,” she said firmly.

  We continued wrapping and packing.

  A few minutes later, she said, “My mother refused to talk about them. And even though she seemed ashamed of them, I could see she loved them very much, and was so happy to see them.”

  I felt a gust of arctic air and I saw them, my ancestors, smiling proudly beside their sled.

  My eyes stung with tears of my grandmother’s memory, forcing them to flutter.

  I had tucked that song and shame away with everything else I didn’t understand and thought I should forget. On an unconscious level, I think I’d always believed, deep down in the hidden crevices of my brain, that the language of that song represented the root of the dark occult arts my parents practiced. Now I realized it was a language of the Sámi people, the indigenous reindeer herders of the Arctic region across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Siberia. Their children, like American Indian children, were forced into boarding schools and forbidden to speak their languages, of which most dialects had been lost.

  Gifted now with the true source of the song’s language, I felt a sense of belonging. Perhaps our Sámi ancestors knew something beautifully spiritual, which people of greed tried to steal from them when they stole their children. Maybe if Grandma and I had known them, our lives would have been different, better.

  A week later, Grandma Elsa moved to Rockford Illinois, into the old folks home catering to aging Swedes. There she began speaking Swedish again, the language of her youth, and read the Swedish papers to the elders in the nursing home section of the facility. We never again spoke of the Sámi song nor our Sámi relations, the lovely song and it’s meaning lost, remaining with the spirits of our ancestors, whom I often see on sleds behind herds of reindeer in my visions between sleep and wake. Sometimes, if I listen real hard, I hear it, the song, but can never remember it when I fully wake up.

• "Reflections Across Time & Space"
  Grande Dame Literary Journal
  Summer 2022

  Shimmering heat rose from the roadway, watery, as if sailing on the rippling waves of a shallow sea. I placed my hand on sleeping two-year-old Kami’s stomach, the rhythm of her breathing synchronized to the sound of the Greyhound bus rolling over rough highway.

  Kami. 

  Was that really her name? I’d changed it to be rid of my family, including Grandma Elsa, for whom I’d named her. As the miles grinded behind us, thoughts of my grandmother surfaced from a deep well of emotion. 

  Noticing my reflection in the window, hazy from the sizzling heat beyond, I saw Grandma Elsa gazing back at me, a young woman again—blonde hair, sharp Scandinavian nose, and sapphire eyes mirroring each other across time and space. Drowsy, I floated on waves of memory to Grandma’s Chicago apartment, when I stayed with her through the final weeks of Grandpa’s life.

  I’d been working at the Wrigley Building on Michigan Avenue, answering phones and typing up contracts for a company selling radio spots for national stations. I took the subway home to Grandma’s 1920s apartment building, a quick walk from the station. When I rang the doorbell above her mail slot, she pressed the buzzer so quickly I knew she’d been standing there, waiting. I walked up the red-carpeted, squeaky stairs as I had done all the years of my life, greeted by the scrumptious aroma of her famous cardamon bread, or roast-beef dinner warming the chilly stairwell.

  Every evening, the same greetings.

  “Hi Grandma!” I walked through the door she’d left ajar, grasping the old-fashioned glass doorknob to close it behind me with a metal click.

  “Is that you, Annie?” Grandma called from the kitchen in her sing-song Swedish accent.

  “Uh, yeah, Gran. Were you expecting someone else?” I crossed through the dining room to the kitchen to kiss her cheek. 

  “I hope you like supper,” she always said, as if I could possibly not. 

  We ate in her kitchen. I liked it that way, warm and cozy. Grandma talked about Sweden.

  “When did you leave, Gran?” I’m sure I’d been told, but had never listened.

  “1916,” she quickly answered. She smiled, buttering a slice of limpa, a dark bread with tiny pieces of pickled orange rind. “I was twenty-one.”

  “Why did you and grandpa leave Sweden?” I too buttered a slice. 

  She looked off into the past somewhere above my head, dabbing a drop of gravy off her chin. “My mother told me to go,” she firmly said.

  “Why?” 

  “Ahhh, It’s a long story.”

  “We have time.”

  “Well … my mother didn’t want me to go, but America was a chance for a better life. There were no yobs in Sweden,” she said, j pronounced y in Swedish. “Everybody was poor. Your grandfather Yohn offered to pay my way.” She cleared her throat. “I met him when I was sixteen. He came to the house before he left for America. Two times,” she added. 

  I knew Grandpa John had paid her passage, assuming they’d been in love. The way she told it now, I sensed romance may not have been the basis of their marriage.

  “You mean you only met John twice before you saw him again, in America?” 

  “Yes, Annie,” she said defensively.

  “Sssoooo, then it was an arranged marriage sort of thing.”

  “No, not like that.” 

  “Grandma, it sure sounds like it.”

  “No. It wasn’t. He was okay. I liked him. He was very handsome.”

  “You wanted to leave Sweden?”

  “Well, no.” Grandma wouldn’t look at me. I let it go and we ate in silence.

  During dessert I asked, “Why don’t you go home?”

  “To Sweden?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, I could never do that.” She didn’t sound too convincing.

   “Why not? Your sister is still alive.”

  “Pshew. Don’t be foolish.” She batted my suggestion away with a swipe of her napkin. 

  . . . Grandpa John died in November 1982. He was ninety-one. 

  I stayed until Grandma moved into a retirement home in Rockford, Illinois, catering to Swedish elders. We continued our routine in the kitchen I’d be heartbroken to leave. One Friday evening, preparing dough for her coffee bread, out of the blue she revealed a shocking secret. 

  “On my way to America, I fell in love,” she blurted, vigorously kneading dough.

  I was stunned. I had never heard this before. 

  “Wow! Why didn’t you marry him?” 

  “Your grandfather paid my way. I was debted to him.”

  “Grandma! Couldn’t you have just paid him back, or something?”

  “No!” she firmly said. “I had a yob in Chicago anyway, as a governess on Lake Shore Drive. Anders was going to Minnesota.” 

  “That’s terrible.”

  “These things happened,” she said softly. “We yust accepted it.” 

  Grandma explained that her emigration to the U.S. began in Stockholm, where they’d met. Pink bloomed on her cheeks, and her smile stretched her old face into a shadow of the beauty she’d once been. They were there for two months, waiting for delayed paperwork for passage on the ship. Once aboard, the voyage took two weeks. “So, we spent every moment together,” she confessed. 

  I almost asked if she ever loved my grandfather, but didn’t dare.

  ***

  Back on the bus, I imagined Grandma Elsa at the retirement home looking through old photographs of Anders. I finally understood her, woman to woman. I wondered if she knew why I’d distanced myself from my family. Did she regret not running off with Anders, where maybe their grandchildren would have been safe?

  Elsa was the only member of her family to leave Sweden. She went home to visit twice when I was a kid, alone, without Grandpa. She packed her blue American Tourister suitcase with her American clothes and gifts for her mother and sister. The same blue suitcase now stored in the bowels of the bus – the only thing I had left of her. 

  I looked at my sleeping child, the purpose of my life, her eyes fluttering in a dream. I looked at Grandma’s reflection mirrored in the bus window. Across the miles that separated us, which meant nothing now, I confessed my deepest secret. I’ve been terribly alone with Little Elsa, Grandma. I’m sorry I changed her name, forsaking everything I’d ever known, even you. Yet, here I am, taking her “home” to my sisters; it’s where we go when we’re lost. Isn’t it?

  I pictured Grandma nestled in her chair, snowy-white head cocked, ear to the sky, catching my words on waves of shimmering echoes. Annie, you are not alone, I heard her whisper. 

  In the transition between past and present, I replied, I still love you. 

  I opened my eyes. Kami was awake, watching me. “Hi, Mommy.”

  Stroking her sunshine hair, I smiled. “Hello, Little Elsa.”

• "Unsolicited Abortion"
  Tangled Locks Journal
  Abortion Stories, Summer 2022

  1975. Something bad is going to happen. Something sad.

  A couple of months ago, before school let out, I found out I was pregnant. I don’t know what to do. I’m sixteen, just finishing sophomore year.

  I know I don’t have much time, so I went to an abortion clinic this morning, all by myself. But I couldn’t do it. I ran out of there, scared to death, not wanting to abort the fetus.

  I have to tell my parents. I’m scared, so I talk to my sister Lorraine first.

  She yells at me in a whisper, like she does—lips pursed in a sneer with deep lines furrowing her upper lip like an old lady who’s been smoking for sixty years, even though she’s just turned eighteen in May. She jabs her pointed finger in my chest and says, “You have to get an abortion, you have to.”

  As always, I listen to her, and reluctantly tell my parents.

  Well, there’s no way they’re going to allow me to have this baby. After all, they can’t let their friends find out I’m not a virgin. I don’t want an abortion, but they harass me so much about it, I can’t refuse.

  I’m almost five months pregnant now, so I can’t get an abortion at the clinic. I secretly waited so it would be too late. But, no such luck. My parents are arranging for me to have an experimental abortion, a brand new procedure being performed on humans for the first time, and only at one hospital, in Chicago.

  My parents originally planned to send me to New York for a saline-injection-miscarriage-abortion, and are so happy to have found something closer to home. This forced-miscarriage-abortion in Chicago is performed by a hormone injection—estrogen or progesterone, I don’t know which. Could be testosterone for all I know.

  I can’t believe how much time and effort my parents have put into this abortion. It’s the most attention I’ve gotten from them since . . . well, it’s probably the most attention I’ve ever gotten from them. Not exactly the type of attention I’d like, though.

  ****

  The day has come and I’m not happy about what’s going to happen. So, I leave this morning and run over to Jim’s house, whom my father has now forbidden me from seeing. To my utter astonishment, my father shows up at Jim’s door! I had no idea my father knows where Jim lives; maybe my sister Lorraine told him. He drags me to the car with an angry grimace as if I’ve caused him the greatest inconvenience ever.

  I look out the back window at Jim on the sidewalk as we drive away.

  ****

  The nurses are nice to me. There are two other girls sharing a room with me, fellow guinea pigs.

  I’m begging for drugs to make me sleep. I want to be totally unconscious for this. They consent with a morphine drip, I think it is, from an IV bag. Too bad for me I can’t go fully under, so I’m half-awake when the cramping starts, but mercifully in and out of consciousness for the next several hours it takes for the fetus to die. Die! I keep waking up, talking, but have no idea what I’m talking about, or to whom.

  The moment has come and I wish, I wish, I wish I could be unconscious. I don’t want to hear the nurse and doctor talking about how much it weighs. I will myself not to hear, humming “lalalalalalala” under my breath.

  ****

  It’s Wintertime now. The day is getting late. Snow falls in a flurry as the sky begins to darken. There is a fog over the field where deer are emerging for their long night foraging.

  My loneliness now is like a comfortable blanket, surrounding me with warmth, a comforting solitude as I watch the snow. Sitting here in the baby-blue VW Bug I share with my sisters, I gather myself into my private solitude. No one knows where I am. I am safe. I am me. In the quiet of the countryside, I can dream of becoming whatever I wish to be.

  When did this desire for solitude begin? On that lonely night in my childhood when my abusers abandoned me in a dark room in the city? It was then, I think, that I gathered myself up and turned my abandonment into a comfortable sense of self. To survive.

  Since the abortion, I’ve been spending every night after dinner in my bedroom. I close the door, turn off the lights, and listen to music all night. I’m drained after a long day at school, followed by my first job as a typist at the travel agency. I’m still grieving.

  I had my blow-ups when I was a kid, like the time I swept everything on my dresser to the floor, screaming in anguish, throwing everything around the room—no words with that rage, just screaming—an overload of frustration.

  Now, beyond frustration, ever since that day I saw my father drive up to Jim’s house to get me for my abortion, I’ve been running. I run and run from portending disappointment, escaping my life in the Chicago suburbs when it’s my turn for the car. I drive to the Wisconsin border, dreaming of the day when I’ll live in the mountains of Colorado, like John Denver:

  He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year

  Coming home to a place he’d never been before

  He left yesterday behind him

  You might say he was born again

  You might say he found a key to every door

  --John Denver, “Rocky Mountain High”

  I haven’t been taking much LSD lately, not even since the abortion. My mind has cleared up some and I think I’d like to go to college.

  I try to tell my father that I want a degree in Anthropology, but why do I bother? He doesn’t even give me the chance to tell him how much I’ve always loved the world’s cultures. He grunts his disgusted “Tsk” and says, “That’s a Mickey Mouse degree.” Then he stands up and walks out of the room, like he always does. Why do I think he’d ever do something different, such as listen to me, encourage me? Hundreds of times, he’s turned his back on me and walked away, and, still, I try to talk to him. My father smiles sarcastically when he walks away; it feels like he’s kicked me in the gut. My face flushes with embarrassment every time he does this. Still, I hope one day I’ll be able to say something he’ll approve of.

  My father applauded me only once that I remember, when I was small. I was learning how to read. I sat on his lap in one of the gold-brocade wingback chairs, reading to him from a picture book. I sounded out the word soldier, and he whooped and hollered, his face beaming with pride. I felt guilty because I only guessed the word because of the picture of a soldier.

  How the hell am I going to get to college?

  Maybe I won’t go to college. Maybe don’t deserve to live, not a good life anyway. Every day I try not remember the nurse saying it was a boy.

  As the years have gone by, it has been difficult to admit my relief for that abortion. I feel sad when I think of the abuse that child would have been exposed to. Many people may think that it is not for me to make that decision. Ultimately, I wouldn’t wish for the consequences of going full term and giving birth to a child that would have been sexually, psychologically, physically, and spiritually abused within my family—as I had been.

  What I would like to see is money and energy going into campaigns to stop child abuse, to have a world where abortion isn’t necessary. But as far back as humans have been on Earth, abortion has been a necessity.

• 2022 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award Semi-Finalist
  First Three Chapters,  Aboveground: Remembering

  Excerpt of award chapters

  Chapter Two

  “I gotta get out of here.”

  “What are you talking about,  Annie?” Mark said. He was in the driver’s seat of my burgundy-red Volkswagen Scirocco because I was too drunk to drive. “Come on. You wanna go home? Want me to take you home?” Mark asked for the third time, exasperated. 

  I was living in West Rogers Park, a northside Chicago neighborhood. We were currently in Skokie, a suburb north of the city where Mark and I had grown up and where he still lived with his mother, in the same apartment they lived in when we were in junior high school. 

  “No, no, no, no! I gotta get out of here. I’m going to die if I stay!” 

  I curled into a circle on the passenger seat of my cute little car, my long blonde hair draped over my face like the last curtain call. “I can’t wait another day, Mark. Help me. Please help me.”

  “Ugh! I don’t know what you want me to do. You’re acting crazy.” He opened the car door. 

  I grabbed his wrist. “Please, Mark, don’t go. Help me.”

  “What the hell do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I gotta get out of here. Gotta go, gotta go . . .” My voice trailed off. I could hear it flying away as if it had taken the last flight out, leaving me behind. 

  “Don’t leave me,” I begged in a husky whisper, to Mark and my vanishing voice.

  “Annie, stop! I’m home. I’m going in now. You’ll be okay. Goodbye!” 

  He pried my fingers off his wrist with a sigh of disgust, slammed the car door shut, and I gave up. I imagined him taking a seat beside my tired and weary words, flying away to parts unknown, leaving me to sit in my misery.

  I’d run into Mark at a bar in downtown Chicago a few weeks before. He was an old friend from junior high school, a year ahead of me, a guy who had a crush on me back then. When we were kids, my mother gushed over Mark when he’d come over to the house with the rest of the gang that my twin sister and I hung out with. I thought she was crazy, having thought of him only as an overweight goon, though funny and kind in his way. 

  Mark and I hadn’t seen each other since high school, about seven or eight years. Seeing him at the bar, I didn’t even recognize him. He’d changed so much – lost about a hundred pounds, grew his hair long. Wow, he was handsome. I liked the way he looked, and I knew how to look good myself. Upon first meeting me, no one would suspect what a wreck I was inside. The thing is, I didn’t know why I felt like such a wreck, smashed and broken. 

  Mark still liked me, although this night may have changed his mind about that. 

  I opened the passenger door to beg him once more not to leave me, but my voice was gone, had already boarded the plane. I gently closed the door, head bent, my curtain of hair blessedly blinding me from the sight of him walking away. 

  Maneuvering over the gear shift, I climbed into the driver’s seat and drove the few blocks over to my parents’ house – the same house I lived in throughout my school years – and asked my mother for some money. She gave me $20, apparently not noticing or not caring that I was drunker than drunk. I staggered back to my car, slid into the driver’s seat, and drove to O’Hare airport to catch up with my sad voice, tired of searching for words.

  * * * *

  It’s Wintertime. I am a child. I’ve been asleep and am awakened by voices. It’s dark outside. I’m in a car? Snow. Cold. I’ve been dreaming about someplace that gives me comfort. A happy dream where I feel warm and safe. Car doors. Joyful voices. They’re leaving. Don’t go! Take me with you! A longing deep within my soul. But I must be quiet. Very quiet. My whole childhood spent in silence. Not a word to anyone.

  . . . I still dream about the place where I belong, but I can never remember where it is when I wake up.

• 2019 Anne Hillerman Nonfiction Award, Gold/First Place
  Celebration of Writing, Albuquerque Museum, New Mexico
  "Reflections Across Time & Space"

  Shimmering heat rose from the roadway, watery, as if sailing on the rippling waves of a shallow sea. I placed my hand on sleeping two-year-old Kami’s stomach, the rhythm of her breathing synchronized to the sound of the Greyhound bus rolling over rough highway.

  Kami. 

  Was that really her name? I’d changed it to be rid of my family, including Grandma Elsa, for whom I’d named her. As the miles grinded behind us, thoughts of my grandmother surfaced from a deep well of emotion. 

  Noticing my reflection in the window, hazy from the sizzling heat beyond, I saw Grandma Elsa gazing back at me, a young woman again—blonde hair, sharp Scandinavian nose, and sapphire eyes mirroring each other across time and space. Drowsy, I floated on waves of memory to Grandma’s Chicago apartment, when I stayed with her through the final weeks of Grandpa’s life.

  I’d been working at the Wrigley Building on Michigan Avenue, answering phones and typing up contracts for a company selling radio spots for national stations. I took the subway home to Grandma’s 1920s apartment building, a quick walk from the station. When I rang the doorbell above her mail slot, she pressed the buzzer so quickly I knew she’d been standing there, waiting. I walked up the red-carpeted, squeaky stairs as I had done all the years of my life, greeted by the scrumptious aroma of her famous cardamon bread, or roast-beef dinner warming the chilly stairwell.

  Every evening, the same greetings.

  “Hi Grandma!” I walked through the door she’d left ajar, grasping the old-fashioned glass doorknob to close it behind me with a metal click.

  “Is that you, Annie?” Grandma called from the kitchen in her sing-song Swedish accent.

  “Uh, yeah, Gran. Were you expecting someone else?” I crossed through the dining room to the kitchen to kiss her cheek. 

  “I hope you like supper,” she always said, as if I could possibly not. 

  We ate in her kitchen. I liked it that way, warm and cozy. Grandma talked about Sweden.

  “When did you leave, Gran?” I’m sure I’d been told, but had never listened.

  “1916,” she quickly answered. She smiled, buttering a slice of limpa, a dark bread with tiny pieces of pickled orange rind. “I was twenty-one.”

  “Why did you and grandpa leave Sweden?” I too buttered a slice. 

  She looked off into the past somewhere above my head, dabbing a drop of gravy off her chin. “My mother told me to go,” she firmly said.

  “Why?” 

  “Ahhh, It’s a long story.”

  “We have time.”

  “Well … my mother didn’t want me to go, but America was a chance for a better life. There were no yobs in Sweden,” she said, j pronounced y in Swedish. “Everybody was poor. Your grandfather Yohn offered to pay my way.” She cleared her throat. “I met him when I was sixteen. He came to the house before he left for America. Two times,” she added. 

  I knew Grandpa John had paid her passage, assuming they’d been in love. The way she told it now, I sensed romance may not have been the basis of their marriage.

  “You mean you only met John twice before you saw him again, in America?” 

  “Yes, Annie,” she said defensively.

  “Sssoooo, then it was an arranged marriage sort of thing.”

  “No, not like that.” 

  “Grandma, it sure sounds like it.”

  “No. It wasn’t. He was okay. I liked him. He was very handsome.”

  “You wanted to leave Sweden?”

  “Well, no.” Grandma wouldn’t look at me. I let it go and we ate in silence.

  During dessert I asked, “Why don’t you go home?”

  “To Sweden?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, I could never do that.” She didn’t sound too convincing.

   “Why not? Your sister is still alive.”

  “Pshew. Don’t be foolish.” She batted my suggestion away with a swipe of her napkin. 

  . . . Grandpa John died in November 1982. He was ninety-one. 

  I stayed until Grandma moved into a retirement home in Rockford, Illinois, catering to Swedish elders. We continued our routine in the kitchen I’d be heartbroken to leave. One Friday evening, preparing dough for her coffee bread, out of the blue she revealed a shocking secret. 

  “On my way to America, I fell in love,” she blurted, vigorously kneading dough.

  I was stunned. I had never heard this before. 

  “Wow! Why didn’t you marry him?” 

  “Your grandfather paid my way. I was debted to him.”

  “Grandma! Couldn’t you have just paid him back, or something?”

  “No!” she firmly said. “I had a yob in Chicago anyway, as a governess on Lake Shore Drive. Anders was going to Minnesota.” 

  “That’s terrible.”

  “These things happened,” she said softly. “We yust accepted it.” 

  Grandma explained that her emigration to the U.S. began in Stockholm, where they’d met. Pink bloomed on her cheeks, and her smile stretched her old face into a shadow of the beauty she’d once been. They were there for two months, waiting for delayed paperwork for passage on the ship. Once aboard, the voyage took two weeks. “So, we spent every moment together,” she confessed. 

  I almost asked if she ever loved my grandfather, but didn’t dare.

  ***

  Back on the bus, I imagined Grandma Elsa at the retirement home looking through old photographs of Anders. I finally understood her, woman to woman. I wondered if she knew why I’d distanced myself from my family. Did she regret not running off with Anders, where maybe their grandchildren would have been safe?

  Elsa was the only member of her family to leave Sweden. She went home to visit twice when I was a kid, alone, without Grandpa. She packed her blue American Tourister suitcase with her American clothes and gifts for her mother and sister. The same blue suitcase now stored in the bowels of the bus – the only thing I had left of her. 

  I looked at my sleeping child, the purpose of my life, her eyes fluttering in a dream. I looked at Grandma’s reflection mirrored in the bus window. Across the miles that separated us, which meant nothing now, I confessed my deepest secret. I’ve been terribly alone with Little Elsa, Grandma. I’m sorry I changed her name, forsaking everything I’d ever known, even you. Yet, here I am, taking her “home” to my sisters; it’s where we go when we’re lost. Isn’t it?

  I pictured Grandma nestled in her chair, snowy-white head cocked, ear to the sky, catching my words on waves of shimmering echoes. Annie, you are not alone, I heard her whisper. 

  In the transition between past and present, I replied, I still love you. 

  I opened my eyes. Kami was awake, watching me. “Hi, Mommy.”

  Stroking her sunshine hair, I smiled. “Hello, Little Elsa.”

• 2018 Anne Hillerman Nonfiction Award, Third Place
  Celebration of Writing, Albuquerque Museum, New Mexico
  "A Lady on the Bus"

  “Against my better judgment,” said my counselor at the homeless shelter, “here’s a bus ticket to Chicago.” She handed me the ticket, twenty-five dollars and, “Good luck!” 

  Early the next morning Kami’s foster mother delivered her to the bus station. 

  “Good luck, you two,” she said, voice quavering.

  “Thank you so much,” I whispered, unable to fully voice my appreciation.

  She handed me photographs of Kami’s time with her, squeezed my hand, turned, and walked away without looking back.

  Two-year-old Kami, on my left hip, silently brushed away my tears with chubby fingers, her little arms wrapped around my shoulders. I began handing the bus driver our things: the stroller, high chair, and Grandma Elsa’s blue suitcase. 

  “You can’t take all of this,” he said wearily, tossing the suitcase into the luggage compartment. “You’ll have to leave something.” 

  “This is all we’ve got in the world,” I said. Kami gazed on in silence with her huge globe eyes, wispy gold curls surrounding her head like a halo.

  “There’s no room!” He looked up at us, hesitated, then silently placed everything in the luggage compartment and showed us to the open door with a welcoming flourish of his hand. 

  Feeling eyes upon us from the windows above as we passed, I stepped up into the bus with my precious cargo, Kami. The door swooshed closed, the air brakes released, and we pulled out of the station, leaving Seattle and our underground journey behind—traveling eastward on a bus, instead of the proverbial underground train that had brought us there. 

  Kami rested her head in my lap. I stroked her soft curls, happy beyond words to be reunited with her. I convinced myself I’d made the right decision returning to Chicago, ignoring the survivor deep within, begging me not to go there. We were headed for a reunion with my sisters and their kids, to love them and to be loved. Right? The survivor within emphatically cried, No! But I pretended not to hear, brushing it aside like a pesky gnat buzzing in my ear. Instead, I gazed out the window at the changing landscape. 

  The lakes and evergreen trees morphed into tree-covered mountains soon after leaving the Seattle city limits. At our first day’s end, we eased into a lovely village in northern Idaho. The sun setting behind the mountains created a smoky-silver glow, barely enough light to illuminate the features of the tiny hamlet. I felt breathless in such natural beauty, so different from what I was used to—the flatlands of Texas and Illinois. 

  I pressed my face against the bus window like a child, craning my neck to see the Idaho peaks. I thought about my spiritual awakening a few days earlier on the shores of Puget Sound, when I’d prayed to a God I didn’t know very well, If You are real, please show me. At that precise moment, the ever-present clouds had miraculously lifted to reveal Mount Rainier, a spectacular apparition filling the horizon and my spirit with glory. My connection to that mountain extended to northern Idaho now, as if the mountains were alive, calling me. I felt I belonged.

  We parked in front of a rustic store made of logs. With Kami in my arms, I walked past the light of the store windows and I stood in stunned silence in the picturesque landscape surrounding us like a shelter from harm. Only the highest peaks were stroked by the sun, painted magenta, tapering down to shades of amethyst, gradually darkening to colorless gray at the base. Kami and I could easily disappear into the serenity of a place like this, I thought. The survivor in me nodded in agreement, as did my newfound . . . God? I ignored the both of them and ran into the store to grab food for Kami. Carefree in my denial about where I was taking my precious child, pretending my life would turn magically for the better, we re-boarded the bus. 

  ***

  Kami endeared herself to the other passengers. Our favorite new friend was a charming, forty-something lady with huge burgundy-wine hair stacked on top of her head like a spirally bird’s nest. She wore a bright muumuu-looking top and black polyester pants that made a swooshing sound when she walked, thighs rubbing together. 

  She asked where we were going and where we lived.  I cheerily lied, pretending our trip was a normal family visit—I didn’t dare tell her about the incest and black magic rituals I had endured, that I’d taken my two-year-old “underground” to change our identities in an effort to escape my past, and that it had ended up a fiasco.  I detected concern wrinkle her forehead when we talked, especially when the bus stopped for meal breaks.  She must have noticed only Kami ate, since the twenty-five dollars from the homeless shelter had had to last all three days of our trip.  

  We parted company with our colorful friend in a dusty rural town in Montana. Saying our goodbyes, she caressed Kami’s head, her shiny, ruby-red stubs of fingernails disappearing into Kami’s delicate blonde waves. 

  With the sweetest smile brightening her heavily black-lined, Montana-blue-sky eyes, she gently said, “Best of luck to you two,” handed me an envelope, and stepped off the bus. Folded inside was a note signed “a lady on the bus” with a worn-out twenty-dollar bill. It felt like a hundred. My face flushed hot as I realized she knew. 

  While Kami slept, I placed my hand on her stomach, the rhythm of her breathing synchronized to the sound of the bus wheels over rough highway.  I gazed out the window at the shimmering heat rising from the roadway, as if sailing on the rippling waves of a shallow sea. The weight of Kami on my lap securely anchored me, in a good way.  Drowsy, I floated on waves of memory, thinking about my sisters, believing the truth of our lives would set us free.

  ***

  I finally ate at our next stop in the rugged plains of South Dakota.  Chinese food.  I felt alive again, by the food, yes, but more so because that red-headed lady fed me a platter of self-worth.

  Kami? She ran up and down the aisle for the rest of our trip, her oblivious sunshine smile and giggles providing a lovely respite from the exhausting heat . . . and the draining effects of poverty.

  Seagulls sing your hearts away

  Cuz while the sinners sin,

  The children play

  Oh Lord, how they play and play

  For that happy day

  --Cat Stevens, “Tea for the Tillerman”

• 2012 Rose State College New Author Award, Second Place
  First Four Chapters,  Aboveground

  Excerpt of winning chapters

  Chapter Four

  

  I strode over to the ticket counter to book a flight for Abilene in my search to find Jackson. The ticketing agent said the next flight would leave Dallas in the morning, with two seats left on the six-seat commuter plane. As we discussed options for the night, a man walked up behind me and said, “Hey, I know you.”

  Turning to face him, I apologized for not recognizing him.

  “We went to high school together,” he said. “Gabe.” He splayed his fingers out upon his chest in exaggerated self-importance, as if the gesture would help me to remember him. “You have a twin sister. Right?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Everyone knows the twins in school. And you two had that long blonde hair. And tall.”

  “Nice to see you, Gabe.” I smiled and held out my hand. I was still a bit taller than he. “I didn’t go to high school much,” I said as my excuse for not remembering him.

  He chuckled. “Yeah, I know. You were one of the Mulford Freaks.”

  I chuckled, too. “Uh huh, I sure was.” 

  He was referring to Mulford Street, behind the high school, where students were allowed to smoke cigarettes. We were called “freaks,” a shortened version of the hippie freak movement, of which we were the tail end. In fact, during the years I attended high school, my only picture in a yearbook was a single photograph of me lighting a cigarette on Mulford Street, placed among the scattered photos of high school life. 

  “What are you doing here? In Dallas? At midnight?” I asked.

  “I live in Denver now. I just arrived for a business meeting in the morning. What are you doing here?”

  I suppose I said I was on my way to visit a friend or something. He dipped his head, and I knew the sadness in his eyes was for me, which surprised me. Maybe he noticed I had no luggage or smelled alcohol on my breath. 

  “Would you like to get something to eat?” he asked. 

  “Oh, I don’t know. I have to find a place to stay. My flight doesn’t leave until tomorrow.” 

  “You can come to my hotel with me. Honestly, no strings attached. We can just talk and you can leave in the morning, or whatever. I have to get up early for my meeting anyway.”

  “Well . . .” I felt embarrassed, suspecting he’d figured out I was flat broke.

  “I’d like to talk with you,” Gabe said. “Honestly, I’m not trying to, well, you know.”

  I scrutinized him, my head tilted to the side, hand on my hip. Something about him reeked of sincerity, and I needed a place to stay. 

  “Okay then. Thanks, Gabe.”

  We walked to his hotel, adjacent to the airport, to check in. Gabe wanted to go to a quiet restaurant. My eyes, however, fixated on the opaque glass doors of a bar in the hotel lobby, so I suggested we go there. Gabe didn’t look pleased with that idea, but I insisted. 

  With a look of disappointment, or maybe disapproval, Gabe shrugged his shoulders and sighed, “Alright, come on.” 

  He gentlemanly opened the door for me. Music and loud voices blasted us from inside the packed bar. I was shocked to see so many people crammed in there after midnight on a weekday.

  I ordered a drink. Gabe ordered pizza. I have no recollection of what we talked about, though whatever it was, I felt his compassion for me and wondered about it; I thought I’d been doing a fine job of keeping up appearances. Gabe’s kindness toward me was extraordinary. I was accustomed to men paying attention to me, but his was different. He listened with rapt attention, patting my hand as would a brother. I sensed he truly cared, wasn’t looking for a weakness in me to exploit.

  When Gabe finished eating and I swallowed my last drink, I nonchalantly pulled out my checkbook. He placed his hand on mine to stop me and said, “Now listen here. I’ll be insulted if you don’t let me pay.” He smiled, eyes glowing with the wisdom of an older man.

  Gabe insisted I sleep in his comfortable hotel bed while he took the floor, making a bed from a couple of extra blankets. My protestations would not move him from this arrangement. 

  “I’m glad I ran into you tonight,” he said so very gently. “I’ll probably be gone in the morning when you wake up. Order anything you want from room service, and I’ll be back around noon.”

  I pretended to be sleeping when he left in the morning. I ordered toast and left him a check for the cost. I wanted to pay my way, even though I knew my empty checking account wouldn’t cover even that meager amount. I wrote him a note to thank him and left, hoping he’d forgive me. 

  How was it this kind young man just happened to be at the Dallas airport when I arrived? Perhaps he was the first angel sent to help me on my journey.

  A perky travel agent in the hotel lobby booked my flight and a rental car for Abilene. I ripped out two more hot checks from my checkbook and handed them to her. “Have a good trip,” she good-naturedly proclaimed, and I walked over to the airport, showed my ticket at the gate, and strolled across the tarmac for the forty-five-minute flight on the tiny commuter plane. I had only been on a small plane once before; in fact, with Jackson, whom I was taking this flight to find. 

  When Jackson and I had been a couple in the late 1970s, we took a trip to visit his brother, a pilot for Port Clinton, Ohio, an island community in Lake Erie. I had no idea there were islands in the Great Lakes. Jackson’s brother flew us to the largest island in a tiny red-white-and-blue plane called The Ford. (I still have the T-shirt Jackson bought me, crinkled with age.) Cars weren’t allowed on the islands, only golf carts and bicycles. Jackson and I rented a tandem bicycle for the day, meeting up with his family for lunch at a cafe in the lovely business district of antique and trinket shops sprinkled along the lakeshore. 

  I tagged along on most of their family adventures, usually to visit wacky relatives, all of us piling into the colossal motor home Jackson’s mother owned. She’d personally invite me, probably to ensure time with Jackson, who wouldn’t have likely gone without me. Jackson’s mother embraced me into her family during the few years I was involved with her son. Secretly, I loved the feeling of being a treasured member of his family. 

  ***

  The rickety plane ride to Abilene left me breathlessly shaken. Terrified, I wanted to at least see Jackson before making my decision to live or die, wanting it to be my choice and my way, which was not death by plane crash. I felt a desperate need to talk to him before I made that decision, counting on his love for me as my last hope of salvation, although I would never have admitted it, not even to myself. I didn’t understand the need for love, like the need for air, water, and sunshine. Yet, I knew Jackson would accept me, welcome me, and, yes, love me. 

  I found Jackson by sheer obsession and bizarre luck. Somehow, I met an older woman who knew him, though I have no idea how I met her. She gave me directions to a new subdivision where she thought he might be working as a roofer. Determined to find him, I drove my rented car up and down every street. Turning the corner on the last block under construction, there he was, on the roof of the two-story house he was shingling. I pulled up to the job site, got out, and leaned against the car, shocked that I’d found him. I smiled, waiting for him to notice me.

  The guys all turned to see who’d driven up, and from his vantage point on the roof, Jackson shielded his eyes to get a better look. He froze with a jolt of surprise, teetered, and almost fell off.  Then, slowly, he climbed down. 

  As he dreamily approached me in his familiar sensual swagger, I smelled his life working outdoors: the sawdust of freshly hewn wood, warm scents of flowers on a breeze. He looked great, still fabulously well-built, with a nice tan and hair streaked with wisps of white-blonde strands of sunshine, all of which presented him as the picture of excellent health. 

  He sauntered over, not smiling, and stood before me, staring. 

  “Hi Jackson,” I murmured.

  He stared at me, mute, and then found his voice. “What are you doing here?” 

  “I’ve come to find you.” 

  Our eyes locked.

  “Wh . . . what?” he stammered.

  “I need a friend, Jackson. You,” I said, pressing my finger in his chest. “Are you still my friend?” I leaned back on the car, one ankle crossed over the other, arms extended down the front of my body, fingers laced. I felt a bit vulnerable, yet confident.

  “Um . . . sure. Yes, of course.” He hugged me, never diverting his eyes from mine. He didn’t even blink, his eyes stuck open in surprise. “What’s wrong?” 

  “I don’t know.”

  He gently released me from his embrace and took a step back as if to take me all in. I must have appeared to him as a ghost materializing from his past. 

  Coming to his senses, the spell that had moved him in shocked slow-motion broke, and he became livelier, his old charming self I had known. Mr. Cool. Suave, I used to call him. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll introduce you to the guys, and then we can go.”

  “Okay. You’re done for the day?”

  “Close enough. . . I can’t believe you’re here!” 

  I giggled, overjoyed to see him. He took my hand and introduced me to the crew.

  I wish I could bring you to Jackson’s house and continue with a heartwarming story. But I can’t.

• 2023 FUSION Theatre Company
  NM SEVEN (Eight) Short Play Contest
  George & Deborah

  

• 2022 Durango Arts Center “24 Hour Theatre”
  One-act Play Festival
  Sarah’s Spirit

  

• 2016 Santa Fe Playhouse
  A Different Festival/Benchwarmers Short Play Performance
  Improbable Encounter

• 2015 FUSION Theatre Company
  SECOND SEVEN Short Play Contest Winner
  Improbable Encounter

• Tri City Record NM

  Navajo Times

  The Journal

• "AIM March First in Farmington Since 1974"
  Navajo Times, Shiprock, New Mexico
  Op-ed Special to the Times published 3/14/2019

  March 9, 2019 marked a memorable day in Farmington [New Mexico] as the first march, rally, and prayer circle of the American Indian Movement, or AIM, in 45 years was held.

  The last was held in 1974, when over 400 AIM members from across the country gathered in Farmington to march in support of the Navajo Nation in bringing awareness of the torture and murders of three Navajo men by three white Farmington teenage white boys in Chokecherry Canyon, north of town. 

  Saturday’s AIM march is also historic in that it is the first time the city granted a march permit to AIM—unlike in 1974, when a permit was refused.  

  This year’s march was a peaceful demonstration to bring awareness of continued racism and discrimination in border town Farmington, or Totah, and San Juan County, which is the indigenous land of the Diné.  

  Included was a representative (wishing to remain anonymous) of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, an organization of citizens working to find people who have vanished from the Navajo Nation and other tribal lands with little or no help from the FBI or local law enforcement. Her daughter has been missing for over four years.

  Mayor Victor Snover of Aztec [New Mexico] participated in the march. He spoke to me, stating that he wishes to be the voice of advocacy and that his door is always open.  

  In a recent visit to Washington, DC, he met with Deborah Haaland, U. S. Representative for New Mexico, one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress. 

  “It is important for us elected officials to show up,” Snover said. “We are here to represent everyone, not just the ones who support us, regardless of what side of the aisle we are on.”  

  He also said officials must do a better job of finding these missing people and if it were “white girls missing, we’d be putting every resource into finding them.”

  Despite the purpose of the march, the folks I interviewed did not talk so much about their experiences of discrimination, but rather their hopes for a future of unity and understanding among all people. 

  In the spirit of Saturday’s event, Michael Topaum, Kiowa Spiritual Advisor of Oklahoma AIM Indian Territory, stated that in regard to racial issues, Native peoples “need to unify with our Higher Power to get along in this life because life is too short and precious.”  

  Tauneka White, Kirtland [New Mexico] Central High School Diné Youth Council Princess said young people “need to keep our traditions alive, respect all nationalities, and listen to our elders.”  

  And Mr. Topaum’s daughter, Evelyn Reyes, Youth Advocate for Oklahoma AIM Indian Territory, expounded further in her statement: “If adults won’t stand up, our young people will. We aren’t afraid . . . and we don’t need to be afraid.  We have to speak for the voiceless.  The children of the nation must stand up for the adults who are afraid to stand up for themselves.”

  Also in attendance were Ms. Reyes’s mother, Mary Topaum, Director of Oklahoma AIM Indian Territory; Sam Gardipe, President of AIM Albuquerque; Saxon Barajas, Prime Minister of Autonomous Brown Berets of Oklahoma, providing security for the event; Christian Johnson, President of AIM Diné Territory; Henrietta Stands-Nelson, great-great-great granddaughter of Peter Stands, one of the few survivors of Wounded Knee; and around 60 others from various tribes around the region and Oklahoma, including Farmington’s LGBTQ community in support of Navajo rights.

  In addition, Joseph Hernandez of Tokoi, New Mexico, gave a presentation on Navajo agriculture. The 2019 Annual Shiprock Agriculture Days will be held at Shiprock Chapter House, Shiprock, NM on March 19-20, 2019, 8 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. 

   

• Aboveground Memoir Series
  Coming Soon

  Remembering Changes Everything
  Seeking New Identities
  Going Home Again Changes Nothing
  Resurfacing, Aboveground

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