Dad is a handyman extraordinaire. He can build or fix just about anything, and always assured us he was happy to do so. He built bunk beds for the boys. Bookshelves for me. Mounted crown molding in all our rooms.
That was my father’s love language, I eventually realized: doing, not saying.
When I was well, I flitted in and out of my house, noticing the kids’ clothes strewn about, the crusted dishes in the sink, the hair in the shower drain.
Oh, well, I thought, such is life.
But when I became sick, I started to notice bigger things. Or maybe the little things seemed bigger.
Like the chipped paint on the gutters. The dull walls that needed a “Pop!” The dilapidated dining table (a dump site for clean laundry) abused for years by kids, including one who drew on it with a Sharpie.
I called Dad.
“I’d sure love to have a built-in bench in the dining area—with storage,” I said. “And, oh! a built-in entertainment center on the opposite wall.”
“Okay. Just give me a drawing,” Dad said.
“But we probably should paint the ceiling first.”
“Who?” he said.
Said ceiling was twelve feet high, with tongue-in-groove wood planks and beams. It would have to be brush-painted by hand, not rolled or sprayed.
“You, Dad! There’s no one better!”
So Dad did it. Cheerfully. Stood atop a ladder for days at seventy-three years old, head crooked, painting the ceiling as I barked color orders.
“Super white on beams! White white on planks!”
We never said anything about my withered hand, or the doctor’s appointments that ended in questions, not answers. We had only awkward silence about my illness. Even after my diagnosis in June, Dad never gave consolation or inspiration. He never acknowledged that I was sick.
But he gave me that gorgeous white ceiling.
It’s funny what a difference a coat of paint can make.
After my diagnosis, John and I hired professionals to paint our house tan with a coral accent. Afterward, Dad stood in the blazing Florida sun, painting all our poolside French doors a deep navy blue.
I took two old sailfish mounts to a taxidermist to be refurbished. One was a six-footer Mom and Dad hooked in 1962. The other came from a neighbor’s garbage.
We hung the sailfish by the blue doors. “Pop!”
I realize now what I was doing: I was nesting. Creating a dream home. The one I wanted to spend my last years in. The one I wanted to leave behind for my husband and kids.
As the cooler weather of the south Florida winter took hold, I began to spend much of my time outside: writing, planning trips and projects, smoking my cigs, more it seemed each day. Steering clear of the general hubbub of television and trumpet practice and arguing kids.
I sat for months underneath a canvas awning on our cement pool deck in a folding director’s chair, staring out at our lovely yard. I watched the mangos plump up more each day. I admired the wide variety of palms.
That is another story of my parents’ goodness. A friend and former neighbor, Bart, is a botanist, nursery owner, and landscaper. Years ago, he landscaped our entire front yard for free. Why?
“I just want to do something for you and your parents. They were so good to me,” Bart said.
He heard of my diagnosis and offered to landscape the backyard as well. Bart took me to his nursery, and we picked a slew of mature trees that otherwise would have cost thousands.
There were triangle palms, coconut palms, spindle palms, banana palms, and bottle palms, the single, double, and triple variety. There was a prized rare bush palm he was so proud of. I can’t remember its name, only the goodness of its gift.
(I just looked it up. A dwarf palmetto palm. Thank you, Bart!)
He helped us plant them around the edges of our pool deck and yard. I sat underneath the awning each day, enjoying them. Enjoying life.
That is one of the glories of south Florida: sitting outside in shorts surrounded by palms.
Then the heat arrived, radiating up from the cement deck and contained by the awning. Even in shade, it was like sitting in an Easy-Bake oven.
One day it was so hot, I saw a mirage on our wide-open lawn: a cool oasis. Perhaps a pergola or a covered porch? Or . . . my brain locked on to . . . a Chickee hut.
Aka, a tiki hut.
An open-air hut, no sides, with a high palm-frond roof. Florida’s Miccosukee Indians had long built Chickee huts for housing. The high roof was waterproof and didn’t absorb heat, creating a cool, shaded spot.
Many people build bars under Chickee huts. I envisioned a big, comfy seating area, with teak furniture, cushioned sofas, tables, pillows, candles, ottomans, a place John and I could gather friends and enjoy life.
A place where our children and their friends could hang out, not under our noses, but under our watch.
I pitched the Chickee idea to John.
“No. I like the open yard,” he said.
I began wearing him down. “Man, these director’s chairs are uncomfortable!”
“Man, it’s hot out here!”
“Think of it as a vacation destination in our own backyard!”
He wouldn’t budge.
He was concerned about money, and the project creating more work for him. He was already overworked.
“Won’t hurt to get an estimate,” I said. “And I will do everything, I promise.”
This was early May. By then, typing on my iPad was near impossible. My hands grew too tired on the large keyboard. My fingers and palm dragged over the touchscreen.
I would aim my curled, quivering finger like a sharpshooter over the letter and hope to hell I hit target.
Hello iPhone!
Its tiny touchscreen keyboard was perfect, because I still had one helluva right thumb. With that thumb on the iPhone, I have written one hundred thousand words the same way you would write a text message. I wrote near this entire book that way.
And I used that thumb to find a contractor and punch up a Chickee estimate.
The estimate was reasonable. We could afford it. I proceeded full-bore. Didn’t wait for John’s approval, which annoyed him.
“Please involve me in decisions,” he texted me from work.
“Okay. Sorry.”
John agreed to everything, but with one caveat: the Chickee would have to be built toward the back of the yard, close to the fence and property line, to maintain some open space in the middle of the yard.
“Agreed,” I said.
Friends helped me gather the permits, complete them, and contact the Chickee builder.
We live in a small, tidy suburb in the middle of West Palm Beach called Lake Clarke Shores. The town is full of nice homes and has lots of legal codes about where things can be built.
I call the enforcers the “code cabal,” but the rules do make for a nice community—large homes with ample open space around them. You are not allowed to build anything too close to the property lines in Lake Clarke, including where John wanted the Chickee.
We would have to apply for a variance, which would take two months and cost hundreds more. I was already living by a stopwatch. “Please, John, just agree to put it in the middle of yard. Think of it as less lawn to mow. Please.”
“Okay,” he relented.
A Chickee hut, fourteen by sixteen feet, got underway. First four poles were sunk in three feet of concrete. Then atop them a skeleton structure of cedar beams.
Then came fronds by the truckload. Thousands of them. Fronds of the sabal palm, which cannot be torn and repel water. Their large fan shape is folded and stapled flush, twelve layers in all.
The mirage came to life before my eyes.
I tapped on my iPhone and bought teak furniture: two sofas and two chairs. “You can do more damage with that one thu
mb than I can with all my faculties,” John said.
Next to the fabric shop, helped by friends, for the perfect upholstery and pillows. Just so happened a weatherproof fabric called Sunbrella was on sale in a delightful soft orange called Mango Bubble. Perfect!
We wired the hut for electric—what’s a hut without ceiling fans, lights, and music?
“And cable TV,” John said, now enthusiastic about the oasis.
A friend heard about the cable and brought over a twenty-seven-inch flat-screen TV. “A gift for your hut,” Val said.
We had no time to mount that TV before another friend, David, saw the empty cable hookup and brought over a thirty-four-inch flat-screen TV.
Wow.
I ordered monogrammed pillows, careful with sizes and colors. “Have to be large enough to lie your head on the sofa armrest!” I insisted, having friends gauge their comfort level.
We laid a paving stone floor underneath the hut, with wide flat walkways for wheelchair accessibility. We bought the Rolls-Royce of mosquito zappers.
We did everything possible to make the hut perfectly comfortable.
And, unwittingly, our code woes made it even more so. The placement of the hut in the middle of the yard allowed more breeze to enter it from all sides.
The first time I sat in the finished hut, I listened to the wind rustling the leaves, the pool waterfall nearby, our wind chime tinkling. I thought: I could stay here forever.
No matter how hot it is outside, it remains cool underneath the palm fronds. No matter how hard the rain pours, it remains dry. No matter how much chaos is going on inside the house or my head, the hut remains serene.
John strung small globe lights along the roof frame. At night they softly light us, brightening our lives. We never hooked up the television. Instead, we gather friends. Open some wine. Relax. Laugh.
I sit in the Chickee every day, often all day long. With the children. With friends. Mostly alone.
Wesley comes by to show me his drawings. “Look, Mom, I shaded it,” he says of a precise drawing of Piglet. The shading is new. He usually draws with pens and markers, never making a mistake.
“Beautiful, Wesley,” I tell him, before he wanders off.
I watch Gracie jump and run between the mango trees. She disappears into the bushes, chasing a lizard. All I can see is her white tail wagging, signaling: “Yooo-hooo! I am over here! Having a blast!”
She catches a lizard in her mouth, then drops it so it scampers off, then catches it again. She looks puzzled—head cocked to the side, ears flopped forward—when the lizards can scamper no more.
The breeze blows. A butterfly alights. Gracie comes and lies at my feet, silently, as I write.
I rise early in the morning, a ritual change from my past life. John walks me to my favorite chair, then leaves me to my iPhone and my tapping.
If mosquitoes swarm me, I text: “Help! Spray please!”
And when nature calls, I text: “Stink pickle time. Help inside please.”
John has taken to napping near me on the sofa. Covering the armrest with a big blue pillow, lying his head on it and stretching out.
“Susie—this hut was the best idea I ever had!” he said one evening, smiling.
“Seriously, it’s perfect,” he muttered a minute later, drifting off to sleep. “Seems like it’s been here forever. Thank you.”
Mango Madness
I had a Mango Madness party in early June to christen the Chickee Hut and thank the people who have helped us. Our friends took hundreds of mangos from our trees and cooked with them, then brought the dishes back for the party.
I invited 125. In the end, about 100 folks came. All people who have helped me: made food, sorted photos for scrapbooks, run errands with me, pitched in to buy me an iPad, babysat, donated money.
There was the contractor who was making our home handicap-accessible at cost. Pat McKenna, the private detective. Droves of journalists and photographers I worked with at the Palm Beach Post.
The paper’s publisher came and thanked me for giving him confidence when he first stepped into that huge role. A former writing coach from the paper, Mary, drove from Oklahoma. Tracey brought me a bracelet with a cross on it and told me she was praying for me.
My neighbor—a salty sixty-something retiree—cried as he spoke to me. “I am just so sorry, Suzanne,” Glenn said, his wife, Brigitte, tearing up as well.
Wesley often wanders next door to their house and asks to play, and they oblige. Wes was over so much and asked so many questions about the nude statue by their pool that Brigitte made a little modesty sarong for it.
People like that deserve a party.
John and I went all out. Borrowed tents and tables. Placed tiki torches all around the pool, waterfall, and Chickee hut. A friend hand-made decorative candles on round pieces of corkboard. We floated them in the pool.
“Your backyard is like a scene out of Tropical Living magazine,” said one guest.
We roasted a turkey and a pig outdoors. Had margarita and pina colada slushy machines and enough booze to satiate a shipful of pirates.
At one point, some dolt pulled rather than pushed the lever on the pina colada machine. It broke, spewing coconut concoction as if from a fire hose on nearby guests.
Perfect. I LOVE memorable moments!
Our friends brought eighty-five dishes, all mango, of course. There were mango quesadillas, mango slaw, mango upside-down cake, mango and jicama salad, mango black bean salad, mango salsa and chutney, mango shrimp, mango cobbler, and much much mango more. Foodie friend Jan, of Christmas dinner fame, did a yeoman’s job organizing and displaying the feast.
So there we all were in the backyard. A handful, like me, under the Chickee hut. The rest on bamboo and teak chairs, or at tables covered in tropical cloths. There were lights floating in the pool, tiki torches blazing, fresh flowers, food on plates, drinks in hand, music playing.
And it rained.
Yep, it drizzled for a good hour, just enough to dampen everything, frizz the ladies’ hairdos, and hang a haze of humidity over the scene like a circus tent.
Among the guests was a man named Ron, a fifty-something former reporter we lovingly call “the cranky cousin.” Ron loves to complain.
During the rain, Ron zipped over to me through the crowd and gushed: “It’s wonderful, Susan. It’s so wonderful. Even the rain.”
The crowd migrated under the party tent and Chickee hut, chatting away in clusters. There was an occasional squeal as people who hadn’t seen one another in years embraced.
Years ago at the newspaper, there was a downsizing. A passel of people took buyouts and walked out the door. The party was the largest reassembly of those folks in years. “Probably the only time they would come together like that,” wrote a staffer to me afterward.
On Facebook, guests gushed it was “a magical evening!” and a “triumph by SpenWen!” Which made me smile.
At the party, I did not mingle. I did not see the banquet of food inside my home. I did not leave my chair.
When I walked, John had to hold me under my armpits, steadying me much as you would hold a toddler. I didn’t want people seeing me like that.
It’s called pride.
I also did not eat a bite of mango. With my weak hands, I ate about as tidily as a two-year-old, and it’s difficult for me to talk and eat without choking.
Rather, I kept a bowlful of olives next to me. Olives are (1) delicious; (2) easy to grasp, chew, and swallow; (3) mignons of high fat—more bang for the effort; and (4) salty enough to reduce the number of times hubby had to schlep me like a toddler to the bathroom.
I remember years and years ago when I flew with my infant daughter in my arms, feeling sorry for myself that I could not put my seat tray down and eat the meal. A feeling repeated scads over the years as my young children derailed many
a meal: crying, pooping, spilling, fighting.
I wondered as we planned and planned the party how I would feel when I could not eat with my friends. When I could not overindulge in booze slushies, as I already struggled to walk and talk.
I wondered how I would feel watching the lovely ladies prancing in their high heels. Heels always gave me a sexy feeling, an I-am-woman-make-me-roar sensation. Loved ’em.
But after I fell and broke my clavicle, I began to give my heels away. “What size do you wear?” I’d ask someone who’d done something nice for me.
I stopped giving them away after the following epiphany: You will be able to wear them again one day in a wheelchair. Doh!
So how did I feel the night of the party about all the above? Heels? Booze? Food? Eighty-five dishes! I formerly would have waited until no one was looking and plowed my fork into every one for a taste test.
How did I feel?
I exited without a word.
It was about ten thirty, the party pulsing, the music blaring, people laughing loudly, when John helped me walk to the bathroom for the first time.
I knew then I was too tired to talk anymore, walk anymore, and asked him to help me into bed.
The stereo was right next to the bedroom. The oldie goldie by Squeeze, “Black Coffee in Bed,” was playing. I fell asleep near instantly, perfectly happy.
A triumph indeed.
It wasn’t till the next day in peace and quiet that I remembered that Mary, the woman who drove from Oklahoma, had handed me a small bag. “A present for later,” she said.
I had set it by my chair and lost track of it.
The next morning, John asked: “Who gave you the ladybug?”
I knew it was Mary.
Now Mary and I, back in the day, were not close friends, but I respected her a great deal. And upon her retirement I sent her a card with ladybugs on it.
After my diagnosis, Mary sent me a check and mentioned that she loves ladybugs—their “blessing,” as she said—and still had that card by her kitchen window.
I wrote her a thank-you note explaining that ladybugs have a special meaning to me too.
No, I don’t have ladybug place mats and ladybug hand towels and ladybug salt and pepper shakers. In fact, I don’t have one ladybug in my house. Just one memory of them seared in my soul.
Until I Say Good-Bye Page 16
