Terrance Donaldson: Part 1

Lala stood bolt upright at the foot of our bed—where she slept each night—and huffed out a few low barks. Husband rolled over.

“Lie down, Lala,” I said, glancing at the clock. 3:54 a.m.

She puffed out another series of soft barks, her body erect. The strip of fur running down her spine stood on end.

“Lala,” Husband said. “Lie down.”

For another minute, we took turns shushing the dog. Then we heard the creak of the wood floor in the dining room followed by footsteps into the kitchen. Must be one of the girls, I thought. Husband got out of bed and left the bedroom. I curled up in the warm cocoon of blankets, hoping to fall asleep again. Still at attention, Lala now pressed her rigid body against mine.  

“Oh, Lala,” I said, annoyed. 

Just then, the security alarm began to beep—triggered by an opened door—and Husband came back into the bedroom, heading straight for the closet. I heard the unlatching clicks of his locked box. He exited the bedroom with his .357 Sig.

“What on earth?” I said, sitting up.

I rushed into the kitchen. Lala finally sprang from the bed, following at my heels.

The kitchen window stood wide open. Even the screen was raised. Wafts of frigid winter air billowed in. Husband stood at the back door, staring out toward the alley. His gun hung at his side.

“There was a guy in here,” he said, going for the phone. “He got away.”

Before its beeping could turn into shrieking and alert the security company, I disabled the alarm.

“A guy just broke into our house,” Husband said to the 911 operator on the other end of the line.

I flew around the house, first checking on the girls, then scanning the place for missing items. I heard Husband describe the intruder. He recounted the events of the morning. “He came in through the kitchen window and left through the back door.”

“Anything missing?” Husband called to me.

“Not that I notice,” I said.

“Nothing was stolen,” he said into the phone. He hung up.

“Wait,” I said, my stomach dropping. “My purse is gone.”

Husband dialed 911 again and added the missing purse and its description to the case details.

I went upstairs to the bedrooms of the two youngest to deliver the news, coating my words with calm. Dicka burst into tears, but then fueled by the excitement, she and Ricka scurried downstairs. I headed to the basement to tell Flicka.

“I thought I heard something,” she said. Unfazed, she plunged her face back into her pillow.

Ricka and Dicka disappeared into their rooms. Within ten minutes, we heard a knock at the front door.

Officers Johnson and Drake searched the house, swiping every corner with their flashlights. Then they returned to the dining room to ask us some questions.

“You have a pit bull, and she didn’t do anything?” Officer Johnson said. He chuckled.

“She woke us,” I said with a shrug.

Just then, Officer Drake got a radio call. He talked into the piece on his shoulder.

“Do you know a Terrance Donaldson?” he asked us.

“No,” Husband said. I shook my head.  

Drake relayed some information into the radio, then turned to us.

“We’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is we got the guy. Terrance Donaldson. And we got your purse.”

“Wow. That’s incredible,” I said.

“The bad news is your purse will be in police evidence for a while.”

Then Officer Drake explained their side of the early morning call.

“We had a lot of patrol cars in the area. We just got done with another arrest. A squad saw a car coming out of an alley, and when they made eye contact with the driver, he looked nervous. When they pulled him over, they saw him trying to cover up a purse. They asked him about it. He said it was his fiancée’s. They asked her name, and he said he didn’t know. They pulled him out of the car, found it was your name on all the cards in the purse, and arrested him. He was on probation, so he’ll probably go away for a long time.”

“Unbelievable,” I said.

Then came a rap at the door. Two technicians from the crime lab—a diminutive female and an imposing male—entered with their suitcases.

“That window’s high off the ground,” the woman said to her partner. “You’ve got a couple of feet on me. You take the outside.”

The man dusted for prints on the window frame outside, while inside, the woman dabbed black powder onto our white kitchen window sill.

“We want to link him to the inside of your house, but we’re not getting any prints,” the man said when they finished. “Must’ve worn gloves.”

Officer Drake handed me a card.

“Here’s the phone number and name of the sergeant assigned to your case: Sergeant Sloan. Give him a call with any questions you have.”

Officers Johnson and Drake and the technicians from the crime lab left.

“You were never going to shoot him, were you?” I said to Husband.

“By the time I got my gun, he was already gone.”

For the rest of the day, I mulled the facts of the morning over in my mind. Our house was one of only a few on our block with a security system, and that system was armed, but it didn’t prevent Terrance from entering through the only unlocked window in the house. Husband was home with us and not away on travel for work. Although Lala was too timid to go after the intruder, she woke us in time. None of our property was damaged—no shattered windows or splintered doors to replace. My purse was stolen, but within minutes, recovered by the police. And Terrance Donaldson was arrested.

The crime lab technicians said they didn’t capture any fingerprints. But while the intruder may not have left his mark in our house, Someone else did. And His prints were everywhere.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

The littles

Dicka created her birthday wish list and attached it to the fridge, so I couldn’t miss it. Right after “Converse high tops” and “art supplies,” she had scrawled “baby.”

“We can’t just get a baby whenever we want one,” I said. “Other host families want them too.”

“I know. But just in case,” she said.

Two days before her tenth birthday, I got an email from the Safe Families for Children placement coordinator.

“I know you’ve tried for a baby a couple of times recently. One just came up, and it’s a month-long placement. Do you want him?”

When Dicka emerged from the school’s front doors that afternoon, she waved when she saw me. She ran to the car, and then her eyes lit on the car seat in the back. She screamed and scrambled inside to see the baby. Her friends clustered around the car, peering in at our new addition.

Baby Caden was Dicka’s baby. When she wasn’t at school, she entertained him. At eight months old he still had digestive issues.

“Why does he always spit up on me?” she said, her shirt soaked through again.

“Because you’re the one who’s always holding him,” Ricka said.

We got permission from Caden’s mother to take him with us to a Memorial weekend family camp. Still homeless and struggling, she was grateful. The first night at camp, he was unsettled and ran a fever.

“Maybe he’s teething,” I said.

Husband stayed up with him so I could sleep. The next day, Baby Caden perked up.

A few weeks into the placement, Caden’s mother found housing for the two of them. Before Dicka handed the baby back the day we said goodbye, she clutched him one more time and kissed his cheek.

“Is it too hard?” I asked her in the car on the way home. “Because if it is, we don’t have to do this anymore.”

“No, I want to,” she said. But she turned away from me, so I wouldn’t see her tears.

Our first little one—four-year-old Jamal—left his mark on us. The girls delighted in him. He called Flicka “Jo-Jo” and ketchup “barbecue sauce.” He loved yogurt and basketball—sometimes even trying to combine the two—but he ate too much one day which ended in him "spitting" in the back yard. We read to him each night while he breathed in his nebulizer treatment. And every day, a bus came to pick him up at the end of our block for preschool.

One morning, the girls and I walked Jamal to the bus stop. While we waited, he danced his fastest to make us laugh. But just then, the bus pulled up with a hiss, and the door screeched open. Jamal’s smile vanished.

“No, no, no,” he hollered, his feet stuck to the pavement.

“C’mon, buddy,” I said, lifting him up to the bus steps. “You had a good time yesterday.”

“No!” He kicked one foot up on each side of the opened bus door and locked his knees.

“It’ll be fun, Jamal,” I said. “You’ll come back to me very soon.”

He still braced himself against the door, while I held him under his arms.

“I gotta go, ma’am,” the bus driver said. “We can’t wait any longer.”

I stepped back and set the little boy down. “Okay, Jamal. You can stay with me today.”

The bus driver closed the door and drove off. The girls had witnessed the meltdown, wide-eyed. We all walked back to the house.

“You mean you can do that?” Ricka said to me.

“What?”

“Refuse to go to school like that?” said Flicka, incredulous.

“Don’t even think about trying it, girls.”

Three-year-old Tyrone loved his toy cars. Our living room floor was his parking lot, and he lined them up with precision. One day, our dog trainer and friend, Mimi, came over before school. Her dog, Pocket, zipped into the house, and got sick just then, leaving a puddle of diarrhea dangerously close to the rug where Tyrone had parked his special vehicles. I ran for the paper towels and disinfectant.

“Girls, get your lunches packed,” I called over my shoulder as I ran back into the living room with cleaning supplies. Our dog, Lala, chased Pocket through the kitchen and out the back door. The phone rang. Husband stepped over the activity on the floor as he made a beeline for the door to escape for work. Across the chaos, he raised his travel mug of coffee to me. Mimi and I laughed. Tyrone wailed.

“It’s gonna touch my cars,” the little boy said.

“No, it’ll be fine,” I said. “See? Mimi’s cleaning it up.”

Mimi whisked the mess away, the girls pulled together their lunches, and Tyrone calmed enough to play with his cars again. And just in time, we left the house for school.

As a surprise, I had kept the news of the five-month-old twins under wraps. When the girls returned from school, they dropped their backpacks and clambered to relieve my arms of the wiggly house guests. But with three girls and only two babies, we had to set a timer to settle the holding disputes.

The babies came to us the day of their mother’s court date. The placement was written for the duration of her three-month incarceration, but the judge reduced her sentence to simply probation. We had them only one night—and it was a blur. Husband and I took turns getting up. By morning, I wondered which one I had fed in the night and which one he had tended. I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The crying one?”

When the girls woke up for school, they took the babies from us, so Husband and I could sleep for a few minutes.

The memories of our Safe Families for Children kids warmed us, and we often talked about them. One of the four-year-old boys was skittish around our dog, but another one wanted to sleep with her. We hosted “The Screamer”; one who said, “Kiss me” for “Excuse me”; and one who requested pancakes or chicken nuggets at every meal. And we tucked one in at night with a photo of his mom and sister, because he couldn’t sleep without it.

All the little ones who came into our home quickly attached to us. Like they’d done it before. It made it easier for us, but it saddened me. A little two-year-old girl—as she was carried away at the end—clawed the air to have me back, screaming, “Mama! Mama!”  I felt my heart squeeze. But that was life: by the second day, the toddlers called me “Mama.” We hoped our help imprinted their lives with stability, even if they wouldn’t remember us. And we prayed our love made things brighter and not harder.

Our house was small, but safety and love don’t require a lot of square footage. And they don’t require a perfect performance. Messes, missed preschool, fevers, and spitting up make life real. Throw in a dog or two and some flawed humans, and the adventures become gold.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

Byron

“Here you go,” he said. “It was delivered to my house by mistake.”

“I really appreciate it,” I said. “That was nice of you.”

“I’d want someone to do it for me. Have a great day.”

As he left, I opened the envelope and caught the cash that slid from my birthday card.

The man—no one I knew—had driven a few blocks to our house to ensure I got my mail. He could have kept the card—along with the cash—and I’d have been none the wiser. I was moved by the effort. But what other mail had we missed?

Husband and I noticed how often mail that wasn’t ours was delivered to us. We ran it wherever it needed to go. So did Veronica when she found welfare checks scattered in the middle of the sidewalk right before the Fourth of July weekend. She spent the afternoon delivering the important pieces of mail to the people who counted on them.

The mail delivery issues kept us guessing. One day, I discovered a handful of rubber bands—right by our front door—that the postman had spilled from his bag. They trailed down the steps and to the left. Like Hansel and Gretel’s sprinkled bread crumbs, the rubber bands marked his path. Another day, our mail landed in the bushes.

“At least it got to the right house, if not in the right place,” I said to Husband.

Husband’s eyes narrowed as he peered down between the boards of our front steps. He drove to the store and returned with a special tool—two-and-a-half-feet long—with a little grabber on one end. He plucked the rest of our mail from the dark underbelly of the steps as heroically as if he were retrieving a stuffed animal in that claw game at the arcade.

Then a piece of Glenda’s mail ended up in our mailbox. I walked it to her house, and on my way, found a letter for us that had fallen on the sidewalk leading up to her front door. Two birds with one stone.

For twelve years, we received mail from Social Services for Antonio Long. I returned each piece to the postman. But the mail kept coming. I paid a visit to the main post office downtown to inform them the man hadn’t lived at our place for at least sixteen years—if ever. But my visit didn’t change anything. Finally, we settled the matter with Social Services. By the time we said goodbye to the barrage of mail, I had grown attached to our elusive Antonio.

People in the neighborhood complained. I figured I’d get the mail I was supposed to have, and the rest was never meant to be. We humans sometimes frame things that way for ourselves.

Our mail carrier went away. Someone said he was let go. A new one came, and delivery improved for a while. But not long after, another change happened, and again we needed to pitch in to get the mail to the correct addresses.

“No one wants to deliver mail on the north side,” someone on social media said. I frowned. We weren’t afraid to do it, and we knew of others who weren’t held back by fear either.

While the home mail delivery was lacking, things were about to change at our neighborhood post office. One day in 2007, I discovered the mother lode there—a gift to the community.

“Anything liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous?” Byron, the postal worker, said to a female customer. “Batteries, perfume, kryptonite?”

I smiled, darting a look around. No one else seemed to have heard Byron. The customers around me stared at invisible places with glazed eyes. Others—glued to their cell phones—seemed to have left their bodies behind to wait in line.

“And I trust you didn’t accidentally package up your cat?” he said to the woman in his low-pitched, monotone drawl. Only his eyes smiled.

Again, I shot a look around me. Did anyone hear Byron? The customers in line still stared at their cell phones—or at nothing.

The female customer at the counter looked at him in confusion and fumbled for cash. Then I noticed another woman acting as interpreter for her. With their business concluded, they left.

Byron helped the next customers—a mother and her little boy.

“So are you heading back to the office after this?” he asked the boy.

The mother looked distracted. Before leaving, she took the coloring book Byron gave her for her son.

The line crept. When it was my turn, I pushed my package across the counter to Byron. He eyed the address label.

“I’m glad to see Jim and Sharon are still together,” he said, nodding. “That’s good. That’s good.”

“All’s well,” I said with a laugh. I handed him a Netflix movie. “Could you mail this too, please?”

“So how was the prequel to Speed 2?” he said, dropping it into the bin.

“Not everyone gets the humor,” I said. “But I do.”

One hot summer day, the post office line stretched out through the door. Like the other customers, I made a dull-eyed assessment of my surroundings and waited. The worker behind the counter was in no rush, and his face registered boredom—tinged with apathy. I shifted my weight, the box in my arms growing heavier by the second. After a while, I glanced up at the large clock on the wall and watched one minute tick by. Just like being in labor, I thought.

Then I heard a familiar baritone voice—a droll tone—coming from the back room. Byron rounded the corner, replacing the employee at the counter.

“Excuse me,” he said, loud enough for us all. “Is anyone here about to miss their bus for day camp? A show of hands, please?”

I laughed. One customer flashed a patronizing smile toward Byron and then dropped her eyes to her cell phone. No one else seemed to have heard.

“The pet rock craft starts at 3:00. I promise we’ll get you out of here in time,” he said.

When I got home, I thought about Byron, dedicated to making the humdrum job of a civil servant zesty, no matter the response. On a sea of monotony, he invited us onto his party boat. The mail delivery in the neighborhood may not have been reliable, but his humor over the years was something I could count on.

And the packages I hauled to the post office felt just a little lighter when Byron was behind the counter.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

Garbage

Jars of grain, coins, farming implements, cooking utensils. Archeologists say much can be learned about a people group from what it leaves behind.

We learned early on that part of living in an inner city neighborhood meant dealing with the trash that would blow around when the winds were strong enough to tear into weak bags or overflowing garbage cans. The winter snows covered a multitude of sins, but when they melted away, we spent a chunk of time picking up in our yard. Eyeing the refuse, I’d wonder: Who likes Flamin’ Hot Cheetos? If they ate them right before bed, how well did they sleep? And who eats Zotz or Atomic Fireballs anymore? Stories lurked behind these people who had knowingly or unknowingly let their remnants go on our street, and I wanted to know more.

Although we had our curious moments, we were mostly annoyed by the litter. But those of us with eyes closer to the ground were the most perturbed. The girls noticed the garbage first and expressed their irritation when they were required to pick it up. Lala barked at wayward wrappers, and Veronica’s dog, Frog—of sweet temperament toward all living creatures—came undone when floating plastic bags assaulted her on her walks.

A north Minneapolis Facebook page sometimes devoted whole threads to trash. And people asked: Why all the discarded mattresses? Someone posted a photo of a stack of them—Princess and the Pea style—somewhere in some alley.

“Sure glad we don’t see all those old mattresses over here on our block,” I told Husband. And then a few popped up the same day to keep me humble.

One day, an abandoned pair of men’s boxer shorts appeared in the alley. And not far from them was a positive pregnancy test, snapped in two.

“There’s a story behind that one,” Glenda said.

And I wished I knew it.

One morning in 2014, we awoke to a graffiti artist having left gifts for us in our alley while we slept. The garage across from us got some profanity. But while we missed out on the curse words, Glenda’s tree and our stacks of landscaping blocks and garbage container got their own special treatment.

“Should we report this?” I asked Glenda.

“I think so.”

The City promptly sent someone out to capture photos of the art and issued us stern letters, requiring us to remove it in thirty days or we’d each be fined $260.

“Makes me wish we hadn’t said anything,” I said.

“I know.”

Glenda called the City to ask how to get the markings off her tree.

“You’ll have to paint over them, I guess,” said the woman on the other end of the line.

So Glenda found some brown paint in her basement and did her best to brush over the random numbers on her tree’s trunk.

The artist had painted two hearts on our garbage can. I had mixed feelings. Was it a good or bad sign to be marked by hearts? For a few minutes, it seemed kind of nice. Until I had to scrub them off.

People weren’t the only ones leaving their signs behind. Veronica and Sergio noticed half-eaten baked goods suddenly appear on their garage windowsill one day. Remains of the baked treats were also balanced on the fence posts. The two were mystified—until they spied a squirrel in the act. Before bolting, the rodent tucked a bagel for later into one of their folded camp chairs.

In some cultures, oral tradition is how people bond, explain the world around them, and impart wisdom to their children. On our block, we not only pick up trash—sometimes scrutinizing it with the eyes of an archeologist—but we also practice oral tradition, sharing riveting garbage stories with our neighbors.

Carol Kramer, a writer on ethnoarcheology, declares, “Pots are not people.” But we already knew that.

There’s always more to a story than the trash left behind.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

The message: Part 2

“It could be ovarian cancer,” the doctor said to Glenda. “But we have to go in again to be sure. You’ll need another surgery.”

Glenda had five weeks off from work so her body could heal enough from the first surgery to tolerate the second one. For the first time in her life, she prayed directly to God. And although her new church family had only recently adopted her, they prayed like her life depended on it. Because it did.

During those precarious weeks for Glenda, we took in more kids in crisis through Safe Families for Children: five-month-old twins, another four-year-old boy, a two-year-old girl. Our house thrummed with activity, but Glenda’s place next door was quiet. Too quiet. I didn’t want the silence in her house to speak lies, so I urged her to come over whenever she wanted.

“You can stay too,” I told her. “The sheets on the guest bed are clean.”

We wrapped Glenda into the bustle of our lives, and while I focused on dinners and babies, she helped the girls with math homework and practicing piano.

Glenda’s second surgery came right before Thanksgiving. Concerned about her cat Eliot’s declining health, she asked me to pay special attention to his appetite while she was gone. I noticed he ate a little one day, but then nothing after that. I kept Glenda gently informed, hoping not to worry her.

Lynnea, our Zumba instructor and friend, carried the church family’s love to the hospital with her when she went to visit. And after a five-day hospitalization, Glenda was released to come home.

The Monday following Thanksgiving, I drove Glenda to her second oncology appointment to hear the results of her surgery. While we waited for the doctor, softness descended on the room. And Peace suffocated our worries.

The doctor entered the exam room, his tone light. But his words carried weight.

“You have stromal ovarian cancer. It’s very rare. But we were able to remove all the affected tissue—which is very rare too.”

He interpreted the lab work. Glenda asked a few questions.

“There’s something interesting here that we haven’t seen before,” the doctor said.

I leaned forward, my pen poised over the notebook. I sharpened my hearing, waiting for the bad news—anticipating a complicated future for my next door neighbor.

“We see your body is producing cancer cells,” he said. “But somehow they’re dying off right away. This is what we see in patients who have undergone chemo.”

But Glenda hadn’t had chemo.

“We’ll keep an eye on things. But you should know you’re cancer-free.”

Glenda joked about being a good subject for a medical journal, and the doctor agreed. As just the scribe of the event, I listened. But I knew the truth: I had been let in on a miracle that day—one that burned on the page, igniting my heart along with it.

Still marveling at what I had heard in the doctor’s office, I drove Glenda home from the appointment. Her burden had lightened, but now she worried about Eliot. He still wasn’t eating, and she feared he was dehydrated. She asked me for a ride to the vet. I waited in the car while she disappeared into her house, returning minutes later with the cat in his carrier. I sat in the second waiting room of the day. It didn’t take long for Eliot to get an IV.

The next day, I called to check on Glenda.

“Can you drive us back to the vet?” she said, her voice ragged. “Today’s the day.”

This time at the vet’s office, I stayed in the vehicle. The car had been my waiting room the day we let Dexter go too, and just like two years earlier, I watched the minutes tick by on the dashboard’s clock. Glenda returned—after the shortest appointment in the world—with the useless carrier and a teary face.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

We cradled the emptiness in the car for a minute before driving home again.

In early December, I picked up two little girls—a two-year-old and a six-month-old—who would stay with us for a while. During the car ride home, the baby wailed. I periodically glanced in the rearview mirror as I drove and chirped to her, hoping my funny sounds and songs would soothe her.

“Her hungry,” said Tabitha, the two-year-old sister.

“Okay, we’re almost there.”

I hoped Tabitha wouldn’t run off while I tried to get into the house with the crying baby. I phoned Glenda.

“Could you come over for a minute? Help me get these little ones settled?”

When I pulled up to the curb, Glenda was waiting for us. Inside, she entertained Tabitha in my living room while I made quick work of hauling in the girls’ luggage. Then she read her a book, and the little girl eagerly peered at the pictures. I mixed up a bottle and settled into a chair, nestling the baby in my arms while I fed her.

“Your girls will be excited to see these two when they get home from school,” Glenda said.

“I bet Dicka will want to hold this baby 24/7,” I said with a laugh.

The baby calmed in my arms. Tabitha flipped through the pages of the picture book.

Glenda looked at me, her face serious.

“You’ll take in anyone,” she said. “These kids… and me.”

Her words roused me, and the message from almost two years earlier came back. Suddenly, it made sense.

Give the house away.

We still lived in our 1919 stucco. Our names were on the deed, and we still paid the mortgage. But it didn’t belong to us anymore.

And maybe it never had.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date/

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

The message: Part 1

*In this blog installment, I’ve kept the real names of the Sevy quartet members. Follow this link to enjoy the music of Robin and her three daughters, Lynnea, Ivory, and Danielle—just as our family heard them on that warm summer evening in 2012. www.mprnews.org/story/2012/07/30/arts/msv-gospel

One day in early 2011, the Voice whispered into Husband’s heart. He told me what he heard.

Give the house away.

I mulled it over in the days that followed, sitting with the message tucked between my folded hands when I was alone in the living room in the quiet times of the day. In the solitary places, I asked if it was true, and peace floated down to rest on top of my question.

Husband and I consulted with a man of God—who mainly listened—and we talked about it more when we were alone together too.

“So that’s what we do,” Husband said.

We didn’t know where we should go, but we wouldn’t be Abraham just yet. We waited. Who would need our house?

We talked about some of our relatives—missionaries in another country—and when they’d return home, they could have it, we decided. I jotted notes about those days, not wanting to forget.

We kept living in our beloved 1919 stucco—kept doing life in the neighborhood. We didn’t forget the message, but we heard the clatter and jangle of daily life—the dirty dishes, the noise of our bamboozling Volvo, the pressing school commitments—and responded to those because they were louder.

For about a year, nothing happened with our house. At least nothing we could see with our eyes. And then it started.

In early 2012, I noticed a couple at church had a little one—a new person in their family. I asked about him. No, they hadn’t adopted, they said. They were a host family for Safe Families for Children.

“But isn’t it hard to let them go?” I said.

“It’s not about us,” said the woman with a smile, adjusting the toddler on her hip.

I tucked away what I heard and carried it home with me. I mentioned it to the family. It warmed me.

Shortly after, we learned our niece needed a place to stay for the summer. Between years at college, she wanted to live in Minneapolis to be close to her job instead of moving back home to Michigan. We could work that out, we said. So we tidied up a spot in the basement and made a little bedroom, outfitting it with a bed, a dresser, rugs, new bedding from IKEA, and a lamp. In the summer of 2012, our niece moved in.

One warm summer evening, our niece joined us at The Walker Art Museum for a free family night. We sat on the plaza dabbling in art of all kinds, the supplies already set up for us. And then the music started. A quartet of women stood in the fresh air and waning sunlight and sang their hearts out. Their harmony was tight, their passion evident. Gospel songs and Negro spirituals trumpeted through the air. People pressed in to hear, finding seats on the ground.

When the singing ended, I approached the group of women.

“That was amazing,” I said.

I learned they were a family: three sisters—Lynnea, Ivory, and Danielle—and their mother Robin. And they attended a church in north Minneapolis.

“I live in north Minneapolis,” I said. “Your church isn’t far from me.”

“I teach Zumba there on Saturday mornings,” said Lynnea. “You should come.”

I went to Lynnea’s church for her Zumba class the next week, shaking my northern European hips and shoulders in ways they didn’t recognize, and I wiggled my way through a sweaty hour. I wasn’t particularly coordinated, but I returned the next week anyway. And the week after that. Over the chain-link fence one day, I mentioned my Zumba class to Glenda.

“I’ll join you,” she said.

So Glenda came along. And she liked it. She returned the following week with me. And the week after that.

“I think I’ll check out that church on Sunday,” Glenda said in the car on the way home from Zumba one day.

The second Sunday in August, Glenda visited the church. The next day, she visited her doctor.

“We’re detecting something that could be a problem. Maybe a major problem,” he told her. “We’ll need to do surgery to find out.”

The thought of taking children in crisis into our home through Safe Families for Children often flitted through my mind. I had contemplated it for months. In August, I again broached the subject with Husband.

“So let’s start the process,” he said. He lived life with his hands open like that.

We dove in. By late September 2012, we had completed the paperwork, the background investigation, the home inspection, the interview with a social worker, and the online training. We were ready.

The phone rang.

“We don’t normally call host families about our urgent needs,” the placement coordinator said. “It’s usually done by email. But this need is still unfilled. If you’re willing, we could use you now.”

We quickly embraced our new title of host family and plunged into our duties when a four-year-old boy was placed in our home the next day. Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka clustered around him when they returned from school. He grabbed their attention and tugged them outside to play basketball. They laughed at his every antic and surrounded his every waking moment.

I had a lump in my throat the day he returned to his mother. As our first, he had helped himself to the first portion of our hearts. And we gladly let him take it with him when he left us.

Glenda underwent medical tests, and her surgery was slated for the first week in October. While she was away for two days in the hospital, I checked in on her cats. When she returned home, I called her. She burst into tears on the other end of the line.

“The surgeon stopped the surgery because he saw something bad—spots. He thinks it’s cancer,” she said. “Actually, he’s pretty sure it’s cancer.”

“What can I do?” I said. “I’ll do anything.”

“Can you drive me to my first oncology appointment? Be a second set of ears?”

The next week, I perched on a chair in an exam room. A nurse, svelte and efficient, keyed in information on her computer. Then she slipped out the door. I eyed Glenda, sitting near me. From my purse, I pulled a notepad and pen. My heart drummed, and I exhaled a prayer as the doctor entered the room.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date/

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

The Volvo

The day we purchased the Volvo station wagon in 2006 was a happy day. I felt it launched me into a more exotic life. It showed I was an invested carpool mom, had an appreciation for Swedish culture, and was apt to stop at thrift stores or farmers markets with my reusable, eco-friendly shopping bag.  

Although pre-owned, our Volvo was still newer than I wanted. I had admired the 1970s wagons, but Husband talked me out of the idea; those could be a nightmare, he said. What we purchased was luxurious. Heated leather seats, a sun roof, and a gauge that kept us informed of the temperature on the road’s surface, topped off with an utterly superfluous feature: those little wipers on the headlights.

Our ownership of the Volvo started out innocently enough with the car only needing oil changes. But then things took a turn. The O rings and heater core needed to be replaced. After that, we went to a picnic, and to our disappointment, a man alerted us to fluid pooled under our parked vehicle. We had the fuel leak repaired, and then moved on to replacing the front brake pads, the rear pads, and the rear rotors. The radiator hose betrayed us a few months later, spraying fluid everywhere—including inside the car. The tie rods failed at the same time, so at least our mechanic, Joe, could take care of several items of business in one visit. Then the tail lights and the motor blower became inoperable a few short months later.

With all my frequent visits to Joe’s, we had time to visit. I learned about his family and his dogs. Maybe I wouldn’t see him again until the next oil change, I thought. But shortly after, the car wouldn’t start. Joe gave us a tow, and we learned the starter needed to be replaced. Later, the brakes went out again—this time while I was driving—and I feared for our lives. Miraculously, I steered the car home from the western suburbs without hitting anyone. Another flatbed truck tow was sprinkled in. I now considered Joe a friend. We had been through it together.

The ball joints were swapped out next and then the transmission mount. Over four years of ownership, my hope was battered, and I began to see the Volvo for what she had become: a fickle, backstabbing friend.

“This car might just break us,” I told Husband one day.

“Let’s just repair it again and see what happens.”

Next, the propeller shaft double-crossed us. Now we were getting into parts we had never heard of before. When it was fixed, I drove the car to an event. I saw a friend in the parking lot, rolled down my window to talk to her in February temperatures, and when we were done chatting, we parted ways. But the window wouldn’t roll up. It was a frigid drive home.

After the window repair came the new headlamp assembly. Because of owning a foreign vehicle, none of the work was in a normal, affordable price range. Joe and his employees did what they could to search out the best deals for parts, but the exorbitant prices were unavoidable. And what had first attracted me to a foreign car now turned my stomach bitter.

After one of our summer meetings of “The Rosebuddies and Trent,” the Volvo wouldn’t start. I hopped out and walked back to my friend Robin’s door.

“Do you have a hammer handy?” I said.

I raised the hood of the car, tapped on the starter, and the Volvo fired to life.

“Thanks,” I said, handing the tool back to her. “See you next time.”

Joe’s service station was in our neighborhood—just five blocks away. We had first learned about him in 2002 from the Isenbergs next door. They raved about his service, his reasonable prices, his generosity. He had even sold them a vehicle, letting them make payments to him as they could over many months. What they said was true: he was a man of integrity. He had even towed us a couple of times at no charge.

While I’m one to seize almost any opportunity to make a new friend, developing a friendship with Joe, the mechanic—to the tune of $500 almost every other week toward the end—wasn’t my idea of a grand time. I preferred my relationship with him to run me the cost of an oil change every 3,000 miles.

I imagine Joe saw the dollar signs as distinctly as we did. And he was kind.

“You can just write a check, and I’ll hold it until whenever you say,” he said.

“That’s nice of you, but we can swing it,” I said, propping up my pride.

In early 2011, I was driving on Highway 100 when the thumping and grinding began. I exited and careened onto a residential street just in time. The car died. I quelled the urge to vomit and instead called for a tow.

While the Volvo was in the shop for the third time that month, the unthinkable happened: Husband’s F150, Blanche, wouldn’t start. I burst into tears, and Husband looked like he had something in his eye too.

“Are we ridiculous for keeping this up?” I said. “Now it’s Blanche. When is it enough?”

“Just one more repair on the Volvo and then we’ll see,” said Husband. “The truck’ll be fine.”

Finally one day, Joe had the talk with me—the talk I feared and dreaded, but desired too.

“You might want to look at getting a different vehicle,” he said.

“I’ll admit,” I said, “this has been tough for us.”

“It’s been hard on all of us.”

Because of my denial, I had thrown away the service receipts. Later, out of curiosity, I asked one of Joe’s employees for a printout of all the Volvo’s repairs.

“Sure. I’ll just load a ream of paper into the printer first,” he said.

The day we put down the Volvo station wagon in 2011 was a happy day. But I held tightly to the golden lessons. I had learned I could be stretched further than my limits, character can be built on a couple of radiator hose jobs, and failing brakes are directly proportional to a stronger faith and prayer life.

And I learned I could live through discomfort and drive out on the other side—in a Honda Pilot.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date/

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

Close

The brick commercial building—lodged between the corner store and our house—was lackluster, and only its changing name captured my eye over the years. In the early days in the neighborhood, the sign indicated the building was home to Islamic gatherings. Then it went vacant. A year later, it sprang from obscurity, snagging attention in the big news outlets. The building had been used as an illegal after-hours club, we learned, and at 3:00 a.m. on March 7, 2013, almost a hundred people were gathered at the establishment when an argument sparked, turning into a scuffle. By the time it was over, two men were dead—one inside, one outside. And the two shooters had fled. The usual course of action followed: law enforcement marked off the place as a crime scene, investigations ensued, and the police issued the landlord a notice of nuisance—the legal form of a slap on the wrist—and he boarded up the building.

The morning after the shootings, we rubbed our eyes and wondered what had gone down a half block away at the brick building while we slept in our warm beds. The streets—for many blocks around—were barricaded, and exiting the neighborhood was as tricky as in the tornado’s aftermath. When the situation cooled, we noticed mourners had slipped in behind the yellow tape to build a memorial on the sidewalk. They left behind teddy bears, flowers, signs, photos of the deceased, and remnants of meals consumed right there on the pavement. The only things that touched us from the tragedy were the fast food wrappers that blew on March winds into our yard.

The double homicide was close. But no bullets ripped through our lives. And fear didn’t find a way in.

My brother, a New York City dweller, called me one day.

“So I’ve been streaming Joe Soucheray’s ‘Garage Logic’ out of Saint Paul,” he said. “Anyway, a local news story came up. Notice any unusual police activity at the end of your block?”

“No,” I said. “But I haven’t been looking.”

“Sounds like a guy is holding his girlfriend hostage,” he said. “They’ve got the place surrounded.”

I poked my head out the front door and flicked my eyes down the street.

“Well, sure enough,” I said.

The place hummed with activity. Police cars lined the streets and a SWAT team was in position. Officers surrounded the house in question, guns drawn.

“Since it’s a domestic, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” my brother said.

“I’m not worried.”

The hostage situation was close. But I wasn’t barred in my home by an abusive boyfriend. Or by fear.

My neighbor Marta had a favorite spot in her back yard—her lounge chair—where she’d bask for a measure of each fleeting summer day. But on a Tuesday in the summer of 2014, obligation beckoned. Marta, a formidable culinary force, arose from her chair to serve the common good: she had a BBQ rib contest to judge.

While she was away, two cars sped through the neighborhood, the drivers working out their grievances through open car windows. But words wouldn’t suffice, so the men tried to settle their differences with lead. One bullet penetrated a neighbor’s fascia, and another one pierced Marta’s fence and skidded to rest in her most cherished place in paradise: right under the seat of her lounge chair.

The drive-by was close. But it didn’t keep Marta from living in freedom. Or laughing when she retold the story about the day she wasn’t hit in the backside by a bullet.

One of the two shooters in the double homicide pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to nearly nine years in prison. The other had a second-degree murder charge against him dropped after serving almost a year. The landlord eventually rented the brick building to a church. The hostage-taker at the end of the block was apprehended, never to return. And the police caught the two drivers and arrested them for gunplay on a residential street.

We knew the past. But we didn’t think it into our future.

All the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be.

We neighbors wouldn’t be shaken. Unruffled by the exceptions who passed through our streets with guns, our area of the city always settled back into a rhythm. We didn’t look over our shoulders, and we didn’t lose sleep.

But to be safe, we kept our doors shut tight, leaving fear locked outside alone.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date/

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

Veronica

The day we met Veronica was the day Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka held their lemonade stand’s grand opening. And it was grand. The girls had positioned the card table on the front sidewalk just so. They covered its marred top with a cheery plastic tablecloth, and they had signs. Signs for the lemonade and signs for the iced tea. And a sign for the books that were for sale too. Our mailman, wearing his blue cowboy hat that day, rummaged through his pockets for change. He left with some reading material—one of the Goosebumps books—and a glass of lemonade.

Then Veronica floated by with her two big dogs, walking them one on each side like she was carrying two weightless suitcases. She promised the girls she would circle back after the dog walk with enough change for a drink. And she did. We asked if she was new to the neighborhood. No, she had moved in nine years earlier. She pointed out her house—only five down from ours. What? But we had moved in nine years earlier too and had never seen her before. She said she walked by our house every day, but she hadn’t seen us before either. We recognized her dogs, though. We had recently noticed her husband walking them.

“He’s the guy who looks like Daddy except for the tattoos,” Ricka whispered in my ear.

Veronica spotted Lala observing her from our porch.

“Oh, how cute!” she said.

“Yeah. But just a few weeks ago, I wanted to kill her,” I said.

“I hear you. Puppies are crazy.”

She told us about her babies—Frog, her 75-pound pit bull, and Pig, her 95-pound bullmastiff mix.

“Frog and Lala could play together sometime,” she offered.

“The sooner, the better,” I said. “Lala needs someone to wear her out.”

Bruno, our neighbor from three doors down, strolled up with cash.

“I’ll have an Arnie Palmer,” he said to the girls.

“What’s that?” said Dicka.

“When you mix lemonade and iced tea. Here you go. Keep the change.”

The girls’ mouths dropped open. A five-dollar bill.

The lemonade stand was a success. The girls had moved some books, and they cashed out at the end of the day with lots of change—and that five-dollar bill. And Lala had the promise of a new friend.

Later that weekend, Dallas handed me a pinot grigio over the fence.

“C’mon over,” I said. “We’ve got nothing going on.”

Dallas and his friend Beth—bearing cheese, crackers, and a bottle of wine—entered the back gate and settled in around our patio table. The umbrella went up, and the music went on. Then I phoned Glenda. She came over toting fresh cookies. Two hours passed. Husband found some salami in the fridge, and Dallas ran home to forage for more snacks. I sent the girls to knock on a few neighbors’ doors to invite them over too. Dallas returned with salsa he had canned with tomatoes from his garden. Beth told us about buying the wine in our neighborhood.

“It’s not a bad store,” she said, “if you ignore the barred windows. And the woman ahead of me in line had a wonderfully creative way to carry her credit card: in her décolletage.”

Lala stretched herself out on the warm brick patio, tuning in to our chatter only when her name popped up. The girls brought out the sidewalk chalk, and soon elaborate designs swirled around our feet.

The usual kids headed over to shoot baskets. At first, it was just the four of them—Antoine, Armani, Peanut, and Keyondra. But then a few more drifted over. While they dribbled, they looked out of the corners of their eyes at our table—full of food and explosive laughter—and they didn’t seem to mind the errant ball that forced them to enter the yard to retrieve it. I didn’t mind either.

“So have you met Veronica from five doors down?” I asked Dallas.

“She and her husband have the two big dogs, right?” he said.

“Yeah. She’s lived there for nine years, and I just now met her. I hadn’t even seen her until now. And she hadn’t seen us. Isn’t that strange?”

A few days later, Veronica came over with Frog for our first play date. Lala, eager to have a new friend, pulled out her most unpleasant behavior. But with one well-placed snarl, Frog established the boundaries, and Lala fell in line. Then they ran off in the yard together like two old friends.  And so the weekly get-togethers began.

While the dogs played, Veronica and I sat side by side in lawn chairs, sipping sparkling water. We talked politics, dissected the plotlines of our favorite shows, and bemoaned our loss of nice grass because of having big dogs. I learned Veronica’s husband Sergio had a recording studio in their basement, and she worked for a bank. She was also an artist: her medium—fingernail polish. Each time I saw her, I was dazzled by the different works of art on her fingertips.

“So let’s do nails sometime,” she said. “I have lots of supplies.”

As one with short, no-nonsense nails, I was open to some new entertainment. And so were the girls. Our doggy play dates expanded to manicures at our patio table. And over the seasons, while the dogs played, we did our nails. We gathered some interesting findings: 95 degrees is too warm for nail polish to dry properly, but while 40 degrees is better, one’s fine motor skills are compromised in those temperatures.

Frog was enamored of our girls. I learned she’d wait for their school bus to bring them home each day, and she wouldn’t drop the surveillance until she was satisfied they were safely inside our house. When Frog visited our back yard on hot days, the girls would get into swimsuits and run for the hose. Our canine guest wriggled with excitement, knowing what was coming. They shot cold water in her face, and she chomped at the stream, guzzling so much it ran straight through her.

After Frog was waterlogged, she’d turn back to Lala for more games. They’d face off for some seconds—motionless—before charging each other. The two animals were so vocal in their play I worried passersby would think we were staging a dog fight in our back yard.

Even though she was bigger than Lala, Frog was happy to play the dead dog during their wrestling fun. She understood drama, but not the rules of gravity; as she flopped onto her side on the ground—eyes closed for effect—after a good match, her tongue hung up instead of down.

During one of those play dates, I surveyed the back yard from my lawn chair. Frog sprawled out in the garden in a pool of sunshine. Lala gnawed at a tug rope. The girls slurped popsicles at the patio table, chatting amongst themselves. And for the moment, my nails were perfect.

“I still can’t believe we didn’t meet years ago,” I said.

“We weren’t supposed to meet until now,” said Veronica.

“You’re not an angel showing up suddenly like this, are you?” I half-joked.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said, smiling.

And it made me wonder.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date/

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

Lala

“They found her wandering around the piles of rubble,” Husband said. “Check this out.”

He clicked through a series of images.

“What kind is that?” I said, squinting at the computer screen.

“A pit bull.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Don’t they rip people’s throats out?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want to just go and see her? We won’t tell the girls why we’re there.”

Our miniature dachshund Dexter had passed away almost six months earlier, and the girls still had their weepy moments. Husband thought a quick trip to Wisconsin could fix it.

Next door to our Wisconsin friends, Trixie and Todd, lived Mitsy, a woman who rescued dogs from all over the country. She’d make arrangements for their transport to her, and once in her care, she’d cover all their veterinary expenses and find them good homes. The puppy we were about to see at Mitsy’s house was a north Minneapolis tornado survivor. The dog’s savior—a tenderhearted man—had found her nosing around the rubble a week after the disaster and scooped her up. She piddled on him repeatedly as he drove her to Mitsy’s house.

We arrived at Trixie and Todd’s and entered the gate to their back yard. Their Great Dane, Sarge, played with the ratty-looking, wiggly thing we had come to see. Their son called her Blondie. The girls ran off to play with Mitsy’s French bulldog puppy. Mitsy hovered near the fence to answer our questions.

“How old is she?” I said.

“Maybe four or five months.”

Bald patches dotted the puppy’s skinny body. We watched as she flipped onto her back. Sarge nudged her belly with his nose, and then she rolled onto her feet with lightning speed and transformed into a blonde bullet that ripped through the yard.

 “She has mites, but I’ve given her meds for that,” Mitsy said.

“Will her fur grow back?”

“Oh, yeah.”

The girls giggled, delighted by the antics of the French bulldog puppy. After some minutes, I looked at Husband. Should we? I mouthed. He shrugged and mouthed back, It’s up to you.

“What do you think of her?” I said, turning to the girls.

They looked up from their play.

“Her?” They pointed to the bulldog.

“No, this one,” I said, indicating Blondie.

“She’s all right.”

“Should we take her home?”

“Are you serious?” Ricka said, her eyes wide in excitement.

The girls abandoned the bulldog to play with Blondie.

Blondie came home with us that day. In the car, she was placid, snuggling next to the girls. We lured her into the house with treats. We sized her up, trying to find a more suitable name. We settled on Lala, after Husband’s plucky great-aunt who had passed away at almost 102.

Lala was timid for three days, and then her docile nature faded away and what surfaced was pure puppy. She nibbled on us with razor-sharp teeth and shot through the living room, sliding the area rug around and banging into the furniture. She had energy to burn, but refused to go for walks outside. No amount of cajoling would move her. We decided she must have remembered the neighborhood and the tornado, and fear planted her furry haunches to the pavement.

I read about pit bulls online and learned some interesting things about “America’s Nanny Dog”—the most beloved breed during the first half of the twentieth century. And I read about the heroic Sergeant Stubby and about Petey from “The Little Rascals.” The pit bull’s reputation had changed since then, with the help of the media, and the public craved sensationalism. I was disheartened by some horrible news articles that scrolled by on the computer screen. With more research, though, I learned that as with people, it came down to how the animals were raised and treated. I decided my dog was simply the currently hated dog and the negative public sentiment would eventually pass, just as it had for the Doberman, the German Shepherd, and the Rottweiler.

I told people about our acquisition of Lala. They were happy for us. Until I mentioned her breed. If they didn’t visibly recoil, they disapproved with their silence and frowns. I had formed my own opinions about pit bulls—not based on anything concrete—before I had one too. But now I faced our reality: we owned the country’s currently despised dog. Knowing what we were up against with the general public, we wanted Lala to be an ambassador for the breed.

We signed Lala up for a dog training boot camp later in 2011, and there we met Mimi, a dog trainer sent straight to us from heaven. She owned a Malinois and a rescued pit bull too, so she understood. She laughed easily and assured us Lala was neither dog-aggressive nor human-aggressive—just an obnoxious puppy who needed an outlet for her puppyish excesses. Mimi introduced us to The Chuck-It, a long, plastic-handled miracle designed to throw tennis balls the length of a football field with little effort. Her trick was to wear out Lala before training her.

“You wouldn’t expect a hyperactive little boy to sit down to quietly read, would you?” she said. “You have to let him play on the playground first. Same here. A tired dog is a good dog.”

Lala was eager to watch us and learn. Mimi taught her to obey commands and to run on a treadmill. And Mimi became more than our trainer; I soon counted her as a friend.

One day when I picked up Lala from her boot camp classes, Mimi pointed out another dog in training.

“That’s Monkey. One of Michael Vick’s dogs. He was rescued and lives with a family now.”

I couldn’t swallow the stories that followed about Monkey’s nightmare life before he was saved. The evil in the world made me queasy. I tried to shake off what Mimi had told me and instead reminded myself I had just seen a canine celebrity—a survivor.

Because of Mimi, Lala learned to walk on a leash. Celebrating her new skill, we’d often circle the parkway and venture around a little pond the girls named Lala Lake. But once, passing by a shop on the main street near us, a man saw Lala and me coming and flattened himself against a building as we passed by. Terror etched his face. Another time, a man edged away from us as we walked by on the parkway.

“Is that your guard dog?” he called out.

For a moment, I thought about telling the truth. But instead I just smiled and kept walking.

I pondered life with Lala. What I told people about her didn’t matter; they would believe what they wanted to. Ruling a whole breed as bad for the misdeeds of some was like judging an entire race for the sins of a few. But I smiled at what it was really like living with a pampered dog who wagged her tail in her sleep, was afraid of bugs, and licked our bare feet whenever she got the chance.

Our dog’s future was bright. As bright as the sunshine that one day in the summer of 2011 when she would meet a new canine friend out for a walk in the neighborhood. And all because of Lala, I’d find a new human friend at the end of that leash, and my future would be brighter too.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date/

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

Tornado

Relatives filled my sister’s house and spilled out onto her deck in Cataract, Wisconsin, on May 21, 2011, the day of my nephew’s high school graduation. While I visited, I sat in a deck chair and cradled my brother’s two-month-old in my arms, drinking in the details of his new face.

“We should hit the road,” Husband announced late in the afternoon.

I placed the baby into the next pair of hungry arms and disbursed hugs to the family members around me. Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka gave Husband and me quick squeezes and then dashed off, disappearing into their play world again. They had worn us out with their begging for extended cousin time, and Mom offered to return them to us the next day when she would pass through Minneapolis. This meant Husband and I were embarking on a 24-hour date, culminating in the celebration of his birthday.

The next afternoon, we met our friends Mark and Susanne at the Northrup King Building in northeast Minneapolis, geared up to devour as much art as possible in the final hours of Art-a-Whirl. One had to be selective when taking in the nation’s largest art crawl in a day; there was no way to get more than just a taste of it.

As we left the Northrup King and drove on to The Casket Arts Building, the skies darkened. When we arrived, we bolted from the car, the rain pelting our skin. Inside, we lost ourselves in the art, only half noticing the sirens crying in the distance.

In a jewelry artist’s studio, Susanne and I browsed, chatting about the many uses for an old door. Her creativity overflowed as she spoke, and I caught some of it, hoping to pour it into my own projects later. As I admired a twisted copper coil on a chain, my cell phone rang. Dallas.

“Just wanted you to know your house is fine. A tree fell into Charlie’s—and more are down too. But you’re good.”

“Oh? It’s storming there?”

“Yeah, the winds were pretty bad. There’s some damage on our block.”

I thanked him for the call and hung up, telling Husband about it.

“That explains the sirens,” he said.

When the art studios closed their doors, we drove to a gastropub in south Minneapolis to celebrate Husband’s birthday. We laughed our way through the delicious meal. Before ordering dessert, I glanced at my cell phone. I hadn’t heard it ring amid the happy bustle of the restaurant, and I had missed six calls—some from only acquaintances. Puzzled, I listened to a few messages.

“I’m worried about you. Are you okay? Call me.”

“Hey! Just heard the news. Are you guys okay? If you need anything, call us.”

“Could you call me back when you get this? Heard about your neighborhood. I wanted to make sure you’re all right.”

I turned back to Husband, Mark, and Susanne.

“Everyone’s asking if we’re okay,” I said. “I think we should go home.”

We said our goodbyes and climbed into the car, our thoughts now steered toward the neighborhood.

As we approached our part of the city, Husband and I noticed the sluggish traffic. We turned on the radio. The newscaster pinned a word to the wicked winds from earlier in the day: Tornado. We peered outside our car windows. Emergency vehicles speckled the freeway and multiplied as we neared our exit.

“Wow,” Husband said, after making the turn at the top.

Screaming sirens shredded the air and mingled with the whop-whop-whop of circling helicopters. We crept along, following a string of vehicles that inched forward.

Our neighborhood was unrecognizable. Giant trees, having been slammed down, exposed their tangled roots. Fallen power lines snaked across streets. Some sidewalks had buckled, the concrete tented in places.

Battered cars. Decapitated houses. Splintered roofs. Snapped power poles.

Droves of people on foot pressed through the wreckage in the streets, surveying the devastation. The police parked on the sidewalks—or anywhere else they could. Mounted police wended their way through the chaos.

“It’s a war zone,” I said, incredulous.

My cell phone rang.

“I can have the girls back to you in a few hours,” Mom said on the other end of the line.

“Don’t come here, Mom. You wouldn’t believe what we’re looking at right now.”

“I’ll just take my time. Maybe it’ll be cleared by later tonight.”

“No. You and the girls have to stay away. For your own safety.”

Mom rented a hotel room in Woodbury and kept Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka with her that night.

Husband and I eventually made it to our street.

A tree had plunged into the roof of Charlie’s house, just as Dallas said. I was relieved it now stood empty. Glenda’s back yard was impassable; trees had crashed through her fence. The power line had fallen across our alley. I eyed our property. Husband stooped to picked up one shingle that had blown from our roof, landing on the front steps—the extent of our damage.

After the sirens and helicopters stopped, silence muffled our days and darkness swallowed our nights. The world could be going mad, but with no electricity, we wouldn’t know it. So a friend called each day to give me a report.

The girls and I listened to classical music on an emergency radio while we drew and colored pictures by candlelight. We still had hot showers, delivered by our gas water heater, but the food in our refrigerator spoiled. We spent an hour on the road trying to pass through our neighborhood to go for more.

One day, Dicka pointed at a Salvation Army food truck parked a block away.

“Can we get food from there? Please?”

“That’s for people who really need it,” I said.

The girls frowned, crestfallen.

“You can eat there,” Husband said. “We live in the neighborhood too.”

The girls beamed as the Salvation Army workers handed them goulash and applesauce on paper plates; something they normally wouldn’t have liked tasted good coming from a truck on the corner.

Our power was restored five days after the north Minneapolis tornado. I learned the deadly force had ripped a northeasterly path of destruction, leaving deep scars on some of the most depressed blocks in the city. But the twister that hit Joplin, Missouri, the very same day killed 162 people, grabbing the nation’s attention instead.

In the weeks that followed, valiant men and women surfaced to tend to our community. They flooded in from everywhere. Even some of our own rose up from the rubble to feed the hungry and care for the homeless.

But that wasn’t all that arose from the rubble. Just two weeks later, something new would spring into our lives—something we hadn’t considered embracing until we were faced with it.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date/

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

Charlie

Note: In this installment, the names of Charlie and his family members are real. A special thank you to Tracy for the stories of her dad she’s allowed me to share here. If you wish to hear Chuck (Charlie) Beasley’s band perform, please visit www.beasleysbigband.com for their schedule.

Two doors down lived an old jazz musician named Charlie. We saw him often in the summer, but the wintertime was lonely. Sometimes, we’d glimpse him coming out of his house in the frigid cold—his tall frame as thin as a reed—bent over his walker. He’d gingerly navigate the ice. We’d rush to his car to clear it of snow before he had to, but it was partly just an excuse to see him.

“Bless your hearts,” he’d say with such warmth that we wanted to stay.

Dallas and Charlie regularly dined at the Applebee’s on Central Avenue and 694. Charlie flirted with the waitresses and ordered “Lemonade, little ice.” The two men celebrated their friendship in the same booth each time, swapping stories while they ate. Sometimes Dallas’ friend Beth heard the stories too, and she stowed them away in her heart.

Charlie invited our girls—new bike riders back then—to use his big driveway as a practice pad. They could freely scoot around on their wheels as he watched them from his deck. And we’d gather on that same deck on warm summer evenings, along with Dallas—and Beth too, if she was visiting. Charlie whisked us back to long ago days—days of being black in the south.  

“The fields went right up to a person’s back door. No sidewalks back then, mind you. Only dirt roads—and the driest part was in the middle. So that’s where we walked. And we sat on our front porches to watch the neighborhood. That’s why black folks still do it today.”

He offered the girls sodas in glass bottles, and they clustered around him.

“Don’t ever smoke,” he told them, holding up a lit cigarette between two long, slender fingers. He took a drag and explained he had survived cancer in the 1980s—losing part of a lung in the process—but the habit still held him fast. The girls solemnly nodded, tucking away his words for later.

One day, I told Charlie Husband and I planned to hear his band—Beasley’s Big Band—play at the Wabasha Street Caves, an old speakeasy in St. Paul. Delighted, he invited me to choose a song, and he would dedicate it to me that night, he said. I sat on the couch in his living room—the air around me tinged with kindness and cigarette smoke—and surveyed the foot-high stacks of sheet music on his coffee table. I thumbed through his playlists.

Later at the Caves, Charlie and his band played “Someone to Watch Over Me” by Ella Fitzgerald, dedicating the song to Husband from me, just as I wanted. And I heard Charlie’s heart wail through the bell of his saxophone that night.

Late in the summer of 2009, we heard Beasley’s Big Band perform at the Como Park Pavilion. Later in the show, Husband and the girls deserted their folding chairs to go and dance. During one of the song breaks, Charlie told the audience that because of his recent diagnosis of cancer, this would be his last performance at the Pavilion. A hush fell. Then Charlie’s tone lifted, and he pointed out our girls to the crowd.

“There are my sweet little neighbors over there dancing with their daddy.”

Charlie decided to play his last gig at the Caves on February 18, 2010. After that, he said, he’d spend a week in Kentucky with his oldest daughter Arneida and then travel to Colorado to his daughter Tracy’s house where he would die. But Charlie didn’t stay for the entire set of his last performance. He couldn’t stomach the goodbyes, so he slipped out early. At the age of eighty-five, he made his last trip to Kentucky. He never got to Colorado.

Charlie passed away on February 28, 2010, almost eight years after we first met him on our front sidewalk. His memorial service at the Phyllis Wheatley Community Center in north Minneapolis brimmed with mourners, and several of the waitresses from Applebee’s showed up. Charlie’s loved ones spoke about the man I knew from two doors down. We took their gift of stories home with us to keep.

After the service, Charlie’s children invited us over to his house. While we visited, they sifted through his things, sorting through the mundane items that had belonged to someone extraordinary. I drank in their stories, sitting in the same spot on the couch as I had the day I flipped through his playlists.

They told of their dad, a saxophonist and the first black band member at North High School in the 1940s, and how when the band was invited to perform in Washington D.C., several parents protested. The band teacher placated the disgruntled parents, assuring them Charlie would sit, eat, and sleep separately from the rest of the students. The teacher arranged for him to stay with a black family in the city. Charlie, a featured soloist, was applauded by a white audience in Washington D.C., but had to take his meals in the kitchen along with the black staff who were proud of him and gave him all he wanted to eat.

Another time, in New York, he went to see his sister, a Katherine Dunham dancer. But he wasn’t allowed a seat in the auditorium; he could only stand against the back wall to watch her perform.

Charlie enlisted in the Army Air Corps during World War II in one of the first racially integrated units in the military. He played in the band—a safe place, he felt—since all the members respected each other as performers. Later, he taught music in universities in Texas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. And in his adventures, he played on Beale Street with B.B. King and in Chicago with Duke Ellington’s band.

Then right there in the living room amongst the cardboard boxes, his children packed away Charlie, the musician, and showed me Charlie, the father.

 “My mother divorced him when she was pregnant with me,” Arneida said. “We didn’t have any contact with him.”

“He married my mother next,” said Tracy. “Then when I was twelve years old, I snooped around in some papers Dad had left behind when he separated from my mom. I found divorce papers stating that his former wife had sole custody of their daughter. A daughter! But the papers mistakenly listed the daughter’s name as ‘Anita.’ I searched for twenty-one years to find her, contacting every Anita with her birthdate in the United States. When I learned her true name—Arneida—I found her that very day.”

Then they told me about Barbie, Charlie’s youngest daughter with another woman. Barbie was raised by her grandparents because of her mother’s mental illness. The older children kept in touch with Barbie, visiting her when they could. Then one day, her grandparents were killed in a car accident. Arneida took her in and raised her half-sister from then on.

 “I asked my father about his heart. His heart for God, you know,” Tracy said. “He told me, ‘I’ve given the Lord a lot to forgive. But dear daughter, I’ve squared it all with Him. And He’s forgiven it all.’”

I settled back on the couch, marveling at this family—marked by grace—who drew together because of one man, found a lost one against all odds, and nurtured one of their own when she was orphaned. Now that Charlie was gone, I wondered what would happen to these people who had suddenly bloomed into my life.

Months after his passing, I still contemplated Charlie—the musician, the father, the neighbor. I wondered why no seed of bitterness had taken root in him and what heaven was like now that he was a resident. Dallas told me Applebee’s had fastened a brass plate to the booth the two of them had frequented. Engraved on it was Charlie’s name and “Lemonade, little ice.”

I smiled. I was just one of many who loved him still.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date/

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

The basketball hoop

One morning in 2009, Husband pulled on his grubby work clothes and set out for the garage. He welded when he had the time, and that day, he needed to create a piece for the school’s art gala. Hours later, I glanced out the kitchen window. He had an audience. The two boys from down the alley, tooling by on their bikes earlier, had stopped to watch. Husband handed them welding helmets, so they could witness the scrap metal transform into something otherworldly. Curious, I wandered out.

“What are your names?” I said.

“Peace,” the older one said.

“I’m Freedom,” said the younger one.

The brothers stated their ages: twelve and nine.

“Can you think of a name for this thing?” Husband said, indicating the steel shapes he had cut with the torch and fused together. “It needs a title.”

“Easy,” Freedom said. “We go to an art school.”

Under the observant eyes of Peace and Freedom, Husband completed the sculpture within two days.

“So what do you think?” he finally said.

“I know what it should be called,” said Freedom.

“Okay, let’s hear it.”

“’Springshield.’ You know, for the spring right there. And that thing looks like a shield.”

“So that’s what it is.”

Dallas attended the art gala several weeks later, bid the highest, and won ‘Springshield.’ I traced the piece’s pilgrimage from our garage to the gala in northeast Minneapolis, and then back again to Dallas’ living room right next door. If we ever missed the artwork, we’d know where to find it.

Peace and Freedom popped over whenever Husband worked in the garage. Their friend Keyondra, who was a little older than Freedom, tagged along. She coolly nodded hello, but her eyes sparkled and a smile played just under the surface.

Later that year, we bought a basketball hoop on Craig’s List. It was sturdy with adjustable height. People warned us about having a basketball hoop in the neighborhood.

“You won’t be able to control who uses it,” one well-meaning friend cautioned.

Good, I thought.

On our way home one day, we drove through the alley. Two boys we had never seen before shot baskets on our driveway. They caught sight of our vehicle signaling to turn in, abandoned their ball, and bolted. Husband parked the car, got out, and pursued them down the alley. They darted into a yard near the end.

“I asked them why they were running,” Husband said when he returned home. “They thought they’d be in trouble. I told them they have to respect our property, but they can play any time.”

Our basketball hoop became a ten-foot-tall magnet. And day after day, they came. Keyondra was usually in the mix, and each time, she rapped on our back door.

“I like that you ask permission every day,” I said. “But you don’t have to. Just come.”

“My ma said I have to knock first.”

“You have a good mom.”

I would check in with the kids playing basketball. I asked their names, and when I got back inside, I jotted them down on a piece of paper I stuck to the fridge. I didn’t want to forget.

One day, the usual four kids—Keyondra, Antoine, Peanut, and Armani—were playing, and a few extras sat on the cement, leaning against our garage door to watch. As always, I stepped outside to say hi and learn new names. Two of the names were foreign to me, so I asked for spellings.

“You’re good kids,” I said to the group, embarrassing my girls who hovered nearby. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Later that afternoon, I looked out the window and noticed the kids huddled in a group on our driveway. They took turns trying the handle on the basketball hoop’s pole. I could see it was broken. I waited.

A knock at the door. Aisha—one of the new girls—and Keyondra too.

“We broke it,” Aisha said, her eyes down.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s take a look.”

I examined the handle’s plastic piece that had snapped. The kids peppered me with apologies.

“I’ll see if Husband can fix it when he gets home,” I said. “I’m really glad you were honest and told me. You could’ve just run off, but you didn’t.”

The basketball hoop got fixed, and its luster returned. The same group of four came over almost daily for three seasons of every year. In the winters, I missed them.

“Could we have your basketball schedule, so we can come to one of your games at school?” I said to Keyondra in the fall one year.

She nodded, playing the cool card again, her smile threatening to leak through.

Husband asked Antoine for his football schedule too, and we went to watch him play. We cheered when he ran out on the field. We hollered his name, and eventually, we caught his eye, and he waved back to us from the fifty yard line.

Every day in the summer, year after year, the basketball hoop hosted games. Then came the summer of 2014. We had a big yard project, and I anticipated a blissful three months of getting dirt under my fingernails accompanied by the happy, percussive sounds of the ball striking the cement and backboard.  

But the kids didn’t come.

The forlorn basketball hoop stood untouched. And no balls passed through its net, which swayed like a flag in the summer breezes.

One day while I watered the Japanese lilac in our front garden, Keyondra pedaled by on her bike. She waved at me and then circled back, applying the brakes near our front steps.

“I’ve missed you,” I said. “What’s up? It’s been forever.”

“I got a job at a bike shop in south Minneapolis.” My heart sank.

“Good for you. They’re lucky to have you.” Then I asked about Antoine, Peanut, and Armani.

“Antoine is working now too,” she said. She reminded me of their ages—all of them fifteen and sixteen years old—except for Peanut who was still fourteen.

I felt the same pang in my chest I felt when I caught Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka growing up without my permission.

“Come back whenever you want,” I said.

“I will.”

“The hoop misses you.”

Her smile escaped this time, and she let it shine.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date/

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

Larry Campbell

When we returned home, coming in through the back door that day in May 2008, I felt it before I saw it. I crossed through both the kitchen and the dining room, and when I got to the living room, my stomach flipped. The front door stood wide open, sunshine streaming in from the porch. The door’s lock mechanism was on the floor all the way across the room.

“Something’s wrong,” I said to the girls. “Go back outside.”

I called the police from the back yard. Two officers arrived in minutes, and I assured them we hadn’t been inside the house long—just long enough to see the open front door and the missing lock.

“We’ll have a look around,” the first one said. “Stay out here.”

The officers disappeared inside our house.

“We’ll go back in soon,” I said to the girls. “First, let’s see who can run fastest across the yard.”

Minutes later, one of the officers called to us from the back door.

“You can come in now. It’s all clear,” he said, pulling out his notepad. “Take a look, and let us know if anything’s gone.”

I passed from room to room, checking the house. Nothing. Not even a mess—other than our own—was left behind.

“It looks okay,” I said.

“Dexter was hiding under your bed, Mama,” Ricka said, holding the trembling dog in her arms.

One of the officers jotted some notes on his pad and then gave me his card. Then I watched our sense of security walk down our front steps and drive off in a police car.

I called Husband who was at the airport ready to board a flight for a three-day trip to Amsterdam. I told him about our afternoon surprise.

“Can you come home?” I said.

“I can’t get out of the trip at this point.”

“Not even if you tell them someone kicked in your front door today?”

“No.”

I sighed. “Okay.”

“You’ll be all right.”

I paced while I talked with him, and then I noticed something. “I can’t believe it.”

“What?”

“I guess I only locked the lock on the doorknob when we left earlier—not the deadbolt. I usually lock both.”

“Good. Then you can deadbolt the door tonight. I’ll replace the lock when I get home.”

“And another thing. The glass on the door is covered with fingerprints.”

“Well, we have kids.”

“And there are prints shaped like parentheses. Like someone cupped his eyes to see in.”

“I’ll deal with it when I get home. Don’t wipe them off.”

“Let’s all sleep together in my bed,” I said to the girls that night. “It’ll be fun.”

The four of us slid under the covers. The girls snuggled down inside my arms and drifted off when the excitement of the “sleepover” melted away. I turned off the bedside lamps and steadied my breathing. In spite of the company, I felt alone in the dark.

In the shadow of His wings.

My ears perked up at the sound of each passing car, each horn in the distance. I stared at the ceiling, my eyes wide and unblinking.

I will lie down and sleep in peace for You alone make me dwell in safety. Safety.

The next day, the girls and I talked about the intruder.

“Maybe Dexter was barking so loud it scared him away,” Dicka said.

“Maybe so.”

“I bet he saw an angel in our living room, got scared, and ran off,” Ricka said.

“It’s very possible.”

When Husband returned from his work trip, he inspected the front door. He picked up the phone and dialed.

“We need someone to come over and dust for prints,” he said. “How soon could that happen?”

The cast of “CSI: Minneapolis” was at our front door within the hour. Exhaling male bravado, the men muscled their suitcases inside the porch and snapped them open. They swirled their brushes around on the glass of our front door—inside and out—and examined the doorknob with a magnifying glass.

Husband got a phone call from the police a few days later.

“Do you know a Larry Campbell?”

“No,” Husband said.

“That’s the name of the guy from the prints on your door. Sixteen-year-old. Doesn’t live in your neighborhood.”

The girls prayed for Larry Campbell that night. And every night after that for several years.

Two months after the break-in, a salesman came to our door peddling security systems. I listened to his pitch. So did Husband. We liked what we heard and agreed to the protection plan.

“Do you get tips from the police and then market these systems to people who’ve had recent break-ins?” I said.

“No,” the man said with a chuckle. “But that’s a good idea.”

We ate our dinner at the dining room table while the man installed a keypad on the wall a few feet from us. I wondered if it would make any difference. Brian, the previous homeowner, had staked a sign for a security company into the soil of the front garden when his family lived in our house. We hadn’t activated the system—just left the sign there as a scarecrow. But it was a tin lie, backed by nothing. And Larry Campbell hadn’t noticed—or cared.

The idea of paying for safety now felt ludicrous. As if we could hold our lives in our own hands and trust a system—managed by humans—to bring us security. While we agreed to the protection, I knew I couldn’t rely on it or even on Husband—away so often for work—to protect us. I could only trust the One.

And in the shadow of His wings alone was the only place I’d ever find safety.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date/

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.

The phone call

They say 84% of the fears we have never come true. That leaves a 16% chance they’re well-founded.

In late April of 2009, I had just finished coordinating the gala fundraiser for arts programming at the girls’ school. While there was plenty to do to tie up loose ends, the biggest pressure was off, and I was living in the gleaming satisfaction of having completed a monumental job.

One day, which began like any other, I scurried the girls off to school and then attacked my to-do list: call gala patrons who had left the event before learning they had won art in the silent auction, update the list of final bids, and make sure all the event rental places got their items back.

As I sipped my coffee between tasks, the phone rang.  

“Hi, Mom,” Flicka said, her voice low. “I’m in the nurse’s office.”

My mind rushed to the last time I had gotten a call from the nurse’s office. Then, the nurse told me Ricka—a kindergartner at the time—had taken a spill on the playground and split her chin open, she undoubtedly needed stitches, and could I take her to the ER right now? When I picked up Ricka from school that day, her shirt was soaked with blood, but it wasn’t alarming to me. I was calm on the drive to the ER and cool during the six stitches. But today’s call felt different from the start.

“Hi, honey,” I said, wary. “You didn’t throw up, did you?”

“I have lice.”

My mouth went dry. My heart pounded. Of all the maladies announced by the school nurse on those sheets of paper traveling home by backpack—strep throat, impetigo, pink eye, scabies—head lice was the insidious pestilence I dreaded most.

“Okay,” I said, quelling my panic. “I’ll come and get you.”

I thought head lice was something the school was supposed to keep on the down low to protect the victim’s identity, but when I arrived in the main office, the nurse came out of her room to show me—in front of a handful of onlookers—exactly what to look for, picking through Flicka’s hair right there. And in that moment I cared more about the information than my pride. I needed the knowledge ASAP. I was a rapt student, but while I could see the adult lice all right, I wasn’t seeing the nits she pointed out with a toothpick.

I took Flicka home and called Husband to share the news. His reaction mirrored mine. Next, I phoned my sister. She had been there before. She said she had some leftover products and a good lice comb I could have.

“Do you want me to check you too?” she said when I got to her house.

“I suppose.” She started picking through my hair.

“Uh oh,” she said.

“No!”

“Yeah. And you better check everyone else in the family too.”

I left feeling hopeless—and itchy. Husband got home early, and I checked him. He already had a case of the crankies—and now this. I checked Ricka and Dicka too. We all had the scourge, and the job ahead of us seemed insurmountable.

I devoured information online, shuddering through a delousing video or two, boiled all the brushes and hair supplies in the house, and then tackled the job on the girls’ heads—spending an hour on each—praying my novice eye would detect everything. I spent time on Husband’s head too, but since no one else in the family had the eye for it, I did what I could on myself and hoped for the best.

We started The Big Eradication. We bagged up every stitch of bedding and clothing in the house—whether we had worn it in the last month or not. The stuffed animals that weren’t washable got bagged up for the prescribed two weeks to starve the intruders. A hot dryer was a good thing, I read, so we lugged the twenty-eight garbage bags of laundry outside, heaved them into the truck, and sped off to a laundromat. As I watched countless loads swirling around in the industrial washers, my head crawled. The mental torture is the worst thing about a case of head lice; you’re never quite sure you got them all. And your dreams are haunted by that truth.

I sprayed the furniture with a special lice pesticide when we got home—something I learned later was overkill. In fact, much of what I did was overkill. But what else to do when stuck with the proverbial Old Maid card for the first time?

I wish I could say our first confrontation with head lice was our last, but our kids go to school with other children. And they’re girls—with clean, silky hair head lice love and a penchant for hugging their friends and having sleepovers. The second time the little buggers hit our house, I panicked again.

“’You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness’,” I said, delivering Psalm 91 in funereal solemnity over Flicka’s head while picking through her hair.

Just then while extracting nits, I had an epiphany. If “the arrow that flies by day” was north Minneapolis’ gunfire, then “the pestilence that stalks in the darkness” was what I was trying to banish from my girls’ hair. And the second was more terrifying to me.

Wide-eyed, Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka watched my meltdown without a word. Before I went into full hyperventilation mode, I caught myself.

“Girls,” I said, taking a deep breath and putting down the fine-toothed comb. “Let’s all calm down here. We’ll get through this thing. No need to panic.”

They burst into laughter. Sometimes we moms are the only ones overreacting.

I struggled with striking a balance. Should I allow my girls to have friends, or cut them off from human contact to protect us all from further infestations? As it was, I had become obsessive and developed a hidden agenda when I hugged my girls: it was a way to see their scalps more closely. And I subjected them to monthly head checks for years. In the end, I allowed our girls the pleasure of friendships, and the unwelcome pests came back to visit more times than I could count on two hands. But I had developed a sharp eye for the critters and got their annihilation down to an efficient system.

Eventually, worn down by life and lice, I made peace with the possibility of the unwanted bugs. And I realized the 16% of our fears that actually happen aren’t really so bad after all.

*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date/

*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.