Layers

I.

Spring is here, revealing the layers of things lost and forgotten: paint cans, colored pencils, an empty chip container you don't remember ever buying, a small shovel, dog shit, a moldy pumpkin top--and the list goes on.

The dogs are pure joy, sniffing the grass again and again. My son, too, is pure joy, speeding down a muddy, sometimes-icy sidewalk on his scooter, shouting whooooo-hooooo!

II.

On Wednesday I had supper with colleagues at a Mexican restaurant about halfway between my home and the site of a conference where we were presenting. After work, we'd boarded two vans and driven until we were too hungry to go on.

There was a plastic donkey outside that somehow reminded me of the donkeys in Greece, and two of my friends took a silly photo of me pretending to ride it. (I didn't have any drinks--though my stomach was full and I was happy to be getting away from m regular life for 24 hours after a particularly hard month).

We drove the rest of the way, debating whether to get drinks or get a good night's sleep when we got back. I opted for my room, saying I don't get to be alone often enough. Before I knew it, we were there.

And then, as soon as I got my key to my hotel room and ventured down the hallway, I threw up. It was sudden and violent and my coat and sweater were covered with...OK, enough details.

The thing is, I've been sick since early December. First it was a cold, then pneumonia, then another cold, then a sinus infection, and then--this week--the stomach flu. It's not a surprise--I'd held our almost-one-year old while he puked all over me, and two days later, cleaned up my teenager's puke when she could barely get out of bed. But somehow, because I was on antibiotics and starting to feel good for the first time in months, I convinced myself that the stomach flu had skipped me.

I was so sick I couldn't do our presentation at 3:30 the next afternoon, and I couldn't even imagine getting into a van to ride back home when the conference ended. Thankfully, my spouse had the day off, and she was able to find someone to get everyone to school and daycare the next morning so she could leave for work at 6 a.m. As long as I was home in time to pick everyone up from daycare/after school activities, I could stay another night.

So I went on sleeping except when...other gross things were happening. Luckily, my sister in law, who happened to have the day off, gave me a ride home the next day when I had to check out, though I slept most of the way and barely thanked her for taking six hours out of her life to get me back. At home in my own bed, I promptly fell into a deep sleep until I had to get up to get one of the teens from speech practice and the baby from daycare.

III.

It wasn't until I'd been home for almost 24 hours that I remembered the dreams I'd had during the more than 48 hours I'd been barely able to walk.

I dreamed I brought the entire family to Ohio, where I grew up, to attend the Greek bazaar. (It's called a festival now, but back in the old days, it was called a bazaar). As we were pulling into the church parking lot, my sister told me that the church was going through some difficult financial times, so I shouldn't be surprised that the bazaar was taking place it what used to be the church hall but was now a giant garage. How fitting, we joked--our family had many parties in garages over the years, Greek dancing late into the night.

When I got there, though, I was shocked. The church hall really was a garage, and the stone fireplace that was clearly holding it up and providing its heat (which, by the way, never really existed) was crumbling. Around the fireplace was a beekeeping display with beekeeping kits for sale.

"They're going old school to make some money," my sister said.

"No honey from Akron, Ohio is going to taste like the honey from Ikaria," I said, and we laughed.

But then my spouse and I began to discuss whether we should consider keeping bees in our backyard. As we dreamed about honey, discussing the pros and cons of this new venture, our 14 year old began to whine that she was hungry but didn't want to try the food. Our 10 year old ran off, and our 17 year old ran after him. Our eldest, 26, was asking how much money we had and what we were willing to buy her, insisting she'd pay us back. My spouse held the baby, who had begun whimpering.

It all felt so real.

Let's go see the booths, I said to everyone in an attempt to get people back on track. Booths = junk = teenagers' and 10-year-old's and 26-year-old's idea of heaven.

And that's when I saw my father. He was just sitting there, selling the many miniatures I'd purchased over the years with my house cleaning and babysitting money. He smiled and hugged us all in the I-see-you-everyday kind of way, not the long-lost-relative kind of way.

"You have your own house, so I figured you didn't need these anymore," he said in Greek. Then he handed me a tiny teacup. "But keep this one. It's always been your favorite." I took it gratefully.

We walked on, and then ran into my Thea Katina, who was casually browsing the booths as well.

Keep in mind that my dad's been dead for 10 years, and my Thea Katina for around 30.

"Come on," she said, "I want to show you something." She tugged at my arm, then started walking out the garage door, toward the parking lot.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Just drive," she said, getting into the passenger's seat. I was suddenly speeding down the highway, my eldest daughter in the back seat. Throughout the dream the car's passengers would shift, as would the car itself--at first, I was driving our Traverse, and then I was in my dad's old blue Buick, then in the red pickup my Theo Vangeli and Thea Katina had owned, then my father's blue work van. Sometimes my dad was there, sometimes my mom, sometimes my sister, sometimes all the kids who live with us now and my spouse.

Thea Katina gave me directions as I drove. Nothing looked familiar at all.

Thea Katina never got a license. She also never wore pants. But she was modern in every other way--headstrong, sure of herself, sure of me, too. In her mind, there was nothing I couldn't do.

"Do you know where we're going yet?" she asked, as the house I grew up in--the one her husband had built for our family--suddenly became visible. "Turn," she commanded.

"I can't," I said, slamming on the brake a few feet from my old driveway, the black mailbox still there, its red flag raised so the mail carrier would know to stop.

My father had lost the house suddenly to bankruptcy when I was in my 30s. I had gone home to help him pack. On his last day there, he had wandered the yard, picking dandelions to freeze for the upcoming winter. Dandelions. Tears pressed hard against the backs of my eyes. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw my father there. He was crying.

Thea Katina shook her head, put her hand on my shoulder. "Just listen to me. Drive up the driveway. You'll see why when we get there."

And the next thing I knew, I was knocking on the front door, and a Greek man, younger than me, handsome as my dad had been at his age, opened the door.

"My Thea Katina told me to come here," I said, and the man smiled and gave me a hug and showed me in.

The house was in disarray. One of the living room walls had been knocked down. The kitchen walls had been scraped clean in preparation for repainting, and in the process, several decades' worth of colors showed through in layers, small windows to eras past. The carpeting in the room that had been a playroom, then a sick room, then an office, then a sick room, then an office once again, was torn up.

In the midst of this chaos, a woman was cooking in the kitchen. She looked up, smiled at me, said a perfunctory hello, and continued her work. Also, there were kids everywhere--I counted at least five--running around like crazy, shouting at each other in a mixture of English and Greek.

"I used to live here," I said. "My uncle built this house for my parents. And then my dad lost it because..."

"I know," the man said, waving his hand. He held up several flooring samples. "What do you think?  Which should I choose?"

"This room used to have a bright orange carpet," I said, "before the bland white one my dad's second wife put in. My grandma and my mom both died in this room."

He nodded, impatient, holding up the samples. I pointed to the one I liked best.  "Ah," he said (all of this in Greek), "that's my wife's favorite, too. Probably she'll win this argument. Probably you have good taste." He smiled at me, winked.

The kids were wrestling each other at his feet and he ignored them. The youngest looked in my eyes. "You look like my cousin when she was little," I said. "She's almost 40 now. She was here the day my mom died." The girl gave me a funny look and raced out of the room after her siblings.

The man took me down to the basement. He was in the middle of finishing it--three more bedrooms, because we need them, he said. I could smell lemon, garlic, and oregano from the kitchen right above us. The old washing machine we'd had in the 70s and 80s was rumbling away in the corner. "I can't believe that still works," I said.

I heard the rest of my family getting a tour upstairs from the kids. I went up to join them but kept losing them in the house that seemed more massive now than it had ever been. And, in fact, it was--they had almost doubled its size through their remodeling. But out the back window of the dining room I could see the backyard, the sprawling garden, the trees my father had planted taller than I could have ever imagined them.

Thea Katina appeared again, suddenly, saying, "We should be getting back." But I couldn't leave without going upstairs. I ran up the staircase myself, making note of the glass chandelier that was still hanging above the entryway, one of the house's most distinctive features. When it was clean--and it was now--rainbows shown on the walls in the mid-day light. She must clean it as often as my mother did, I thought.

The upstairs hallway was also in dissaray. The room that my sister and I had shared until my grandmother died--after which I got her room--had disappeared. It was a giant porch-like room now, looking out over the beautiful backyard. I gasped. My aunt Connie's room was a giant storage space, full of boxes. But my room and my parents' appeared to be the same. My bedroom door was closed, so I knocked.

A teenage girl opened the door. "Hi," I said. "I'm Argie, and this was my bedroom for most of my childhood." She smiled shyly at me.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Reading," she said.

"I spent hours in this room reading," I told her.

She smiled again. "I love to read. I like my room because it's peaceful. At night..."

"You can hear the crickets and the frogs if you open the window?" I said.

"Yes," she said, smiling at me again.

We stood in the doorway while I told her the whole story. How my father had brought me to this place when it was just a giant hole in the ground and explained that that hole would become our basement. How my mom had chosen the most hideous 70s colors she can possibly imagine for the decor. The three pine trees our cousin had planted in front of the house when we first moved in.

The raging fireplace fire that greeted us when we returned from my first trip to Greece.

How my grandmother had planted sunflowers and showy annuals out front.

How we hung an American flag up on the 4th of July, don't ask me why, we weren't patriotic but you know how Greeks are about wanting to stand out and fit in. She smiled at that.

The Democratic candidate signs in the yard--how they were stolen all the time but we always put them up anyway. (Ours too, she said).

Where the garden had been at first.  The basement freezer overflowing with produce we ate through the winter.

I focused on the happy memories, none of the sad ones.

"We'll take good care of this place," she said to me. "I promise." She paused and smiled shyly. "We love it here."

On the ride home, Thea Katina said, "You're going to live a long life. In the end, the time you lived here will be only a short chapter."

I realized then that she was driving.

"Wait a second, you can't drive," I said.

"I can now. The only thing that's for sure is that everything changes. That time moves on."

"We lost you too soon," I say, as she slams on the gas and we fly, fly, fly down Revere Rd., down Ira, down Revere again where it restarts, past the first house I lived in, past the high school, down Everett, and then into the deep blue sky.

I am not afraid. I never was afraid with her.

"Everybody dies sometime," she says. And then she slows down, and we're on Bath Road heading toward her old house. "But you--you are just tired. You aren't going to die young. You're going to live a long life."

I realize then that I am 49, the same age my mother was when I died. I realize then that I've been holding my breath ever since my birthday, in one way or another, because life has been a roller coaster of court cases and police interviews and major challenges at work and sick children and my own sick belly and lungs.

IV.

And then I hear my phone ringing. I am confused by the sound. I forget where I am. I reach out and see my family on video, smiling at me.

While I was away, the baby started walking.

While I was away, one teenager got closer to finishing high school, and the other got stuck on an assignment she needs help with, over the phone, right now. It's the Langston Hughes story about the woman who takes home the guy who tried to swipe her purse, and she can't figure out the theme.

"All I can figure out is kindness, but why?" she asks. "Why would the woman take him in instead of just calling the cops?"

V.

After I hang up, I stand up and pace back and forth to test my belly. For the first time, I don't feel like I need to throw up. I drink a little water, feel a little dizzy, sit down.

We don't have a T.V. at home, so I'm not used to watching. For some reason, though, I pick up the remote and turn the giant screen on. That's how I find out Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the race. She is talking to Rachel Maddow.

Someday, I hope, a woman will be president, I remember my Thea Katina saying, and I felt hopeful then.

I don't know, my mom had responded. I want to believe it could happen, but it feels so...

Did I mention my mother died 35 years ago?

Waves of grief roll through my body. I realize I'm weeping. I fall back to sleep.

VI.

And then, all of the sudden, it's Saturday. I wake up twice: once to take one of the teenagers to a speech meet before dawn, and a second time because my son has been up and moving around for at least an hour.

"Look," he says. "I cleaned my room."

"Wow," I say. I am truly speechless.

A week ago, a white and orange cat showed up and wouldn't leave our front steps. My son found a collar in the backyard. It was a long shot; we weren't sure it even belonged to the cat. But, my spouse called, and a woman who lives two and a half hours away got into her car to get the cat that she had been missing since September.

Of course, I was in the cities, in bed, when she showed up with a thank you note.

"I feel like things are going to get better," my son says. It's been a very hard year for him--brutal, actually. "So I thought I'd clean my room."

VII.

For the rest of this day--this sunny, 41 degree day--my son and I clean up the yard, disposing of the layers of forgotten items, or sometimes saving them, dubious treasures though they are. Then we put the baby in his stroller and wander around town, stopping at all our favorite places.

It is a nearly ideal day--the only better day for me would be one during which I lay on my bed with the sun streaming in through the window and read all day, but it's been years since I've had a day like that. I think of the girl in my dreams and wonder if there is a girl in that room, and if so, what she's doing now.

At one point, out of the blue, my son says, "That lady was so happy that we found her cat. You couldn't believe her happiness. I guess that's what happens when you find someone you've lost."

I think of my father and my Thea Katina showing back up in my dream, and I have to look away because I'm crying. And then he says, "I've been a good listener all day, haven't I, mom? Can we go to our favorite restaurant for lunch?"

"Yes!" I say impulsively, and he looks at me as if he can't believe how lucky this day is.

The baby sleeps in his stroller while we eat. My son begins to talk to the women at the table next to us. He informs them that the world used to be unfair to black people, which he's thinking about because just before, we read a book about Thurgood Marshall at the library.

"You're right," one of the (white) women says. "In those days, in the south, they wouldn't have even been allowed to eat in a restaurant if we were eating there. Isn't that just terrible? It's up to us to make sure nothing like that happens again."

Feeling emboldened, my son adds, "You know what else is unfair? Everything Donald Trump is doing to people who aren't rich!"

"Hey bud," I say, about to remind him that not everyone agrees with us, but the woman waves her hand and says, "You've got a friend here, don't worry!"

By the end of it, I realize that I'm talking to a mom and grandma of a special needs child. They are from another small town, which is why I've never seen them before, and are just passing through. It must be fate that we met here, the mother says, showing me photos of her beautiful daughter. We exchange stories about services, Facebook groups, the stupid things people sometimes say.

They get our address and promise to send my son a Sacagawea dollar, because after telling them about Thurgood Marshall he moved on to Sacagawea, and how unfair it was that even after all she did her husband got all the money and property, and that, anyway, the white people were using her all along.

"Your son," the grandma says, "is so kind and so smart. Don't let anyone tell you differently. Everybody learns at their own pace and in their own way." I feel the tears pressing against the backs of my eyes again.

VIII.

"Why is he lying on the ground?" one of the teenagers asks about my son. It's late--too late for him to be outside--and so I'm startled. I look through the window, and sure enough, he's lying perfectly still on the driveway, staring up.

I go outside and lie down next to him.

"Look at the full moon," he says. Then he raises his finger and begins to trace each constellation he can see, naming them, one by one. "It's like they're in layers, lying down in different parts of the sky."

"I know what you mean," I say. I imagine the kitchen wall in my dream, the sample after sample of flooring options the man presented to me, the lost and forgotten items we'd discovered in the snow. I remember him shouting "whoo hoo" as he sped down the muddy sidewalk on his scooter.

It's been a good day, I think. The first really good day in a very long while.

He takes my thought a step further.

"This is the most beautiful night of my life," he says. "I feel like a lady who just found her cat missing since September!"

Then, suddenly, he's running around, throwing the snow that remains--and there's plenty of it--into the air and shouting, "Bless everything!"

"Bless everything!" I echo, doing the same.

And then, after a good five minutes of this, I break the news that it's time to go inside, time for bed.

"The only thing that could make this day any better is if we got rid of Donald Trump," he says, sighing. "But I guess that will have to be another day."