My mother tells me she’s outwitted the thief who wants to steal her underwear. Three months ago, the doctors said she would die of congestive heart failure in three days. She’s outwitted them too. She’s worried about her underwear, not heart failure.

We’re in this together. It’s the moment when everything counts and we’re talking about protecting her underwear, all those pretty garments stashed in a box under her bed—a metaphor for something I don’t want to decode.

“No one will think to look there,” she says.

She’s insistent, urgent, specific, and irate. She’s angry at the unfairness of everything. It’s not bad enough that she got old, that she can no longer keep the wolves from the door, or that she’s dying. Now they’re after her underwear. Her eyes, bombs with lit fuses, flare.

She shares her strategy with me so I’ll be her aide-de-camp in her war against the underwear thieves. I wade through words, hoping to find a way to reassure her that no one will take her panties. Uneasiness stirs my stomach. There’s history at work here, a more terrifying, unmentionable theft she’s never told me about, a story that, in the end, I don’t want to know. A story that might explain everything. Perhaps some things should not be uncovered; perhaps I don’t want all the answers. Maybe truth isn’t enough.

Finally, helpless, I say, “Good plan.”

Her hands are cold, her legs are hot. She throws off the sheet. For weeks she has been sleeping almost continually—or what passes for sleep, periodically punctuating the long silence by slamming the flat of her hand against the mattress. “Enough,” she yells. “Enough! Enough!”

Today she’s talking. When I ask about this new phase, the hospice nurse says matter-of-factly she may be talkative today but it’s all part of the dying process, a kind of illumination as the body rapidly heals itself before the final sigh. I take this explanation with a grain of salt. I no longer believe anyone knows anything about dying.

My mother pauses, daintily puts the tip of her pointer finger against the corner of her mouth and dabs away the grit that has gathered there out of nowhere. Her nails are cut short but are still painted red at her insistence. Her white hair has been brushed into two short pigtails at the top of her head by the nurse’s aide, who intends to be kind and has no sense of irony.

Back to the ninety pounds she swears she was when pregnant with me, she wears only an adult diaper and a blazing red t-shirt. Her speech is difficult to understand and lucid moments are rare. I lean in. We conspire together against what’s next.

“The people here don’t like me,” she says. “My daughter thinks I don’t know this, but I do.” Her brown eyes blaze with indignation. Then she smiles, her winning smile, the one that induces me to run across the hall to the nurses’ station and fetch her chocolate ice cream in a paper cup.

On my way to get the ice cream she won’t eat, I remember standing in the bedroom I’d given her, my entire body shaking with rage. “Where did you put the checks?” I ask.

She lifts her chin and looks out of the window at the safe suburban neighborhood to which I’ve brought her. She’s in complete control of this situation, even though she’s old, frail, and living in my house.

“Where are the checks, Mom?” I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror over her desk. It’s a mask of shock and despair. She has stolen checks from my checkbook. She wants to harm me. Her theft brings up every old attack she ever launched on my survival. I am a child again, helpless against her, raging.

She shrugs and smirks at me. “Behind the boy.”

The boy, I think, behind what boy? She’s being coy, manipulating me. I struggle to be rational, to think my way through this maze. I’m good at this, compartmentalizing my feelings, engaging my left brain. I look around the room and see the framed photograph of my sister’s son, the boy whose name she’s forgotten. I pick up the picture, open the back, and find the checks folded into a tiny square. I extract them.

“Why did you do this?” I ask her, even though I know she doesn’t know why. We are playing out the old drama between us. She must steal something from me to be even for having gone through the agony of having me. I ruined her life, she always told me. To be even, she must take everything—my identity, my father, my sister, my money.

She stares at me with that look on her face that used to precede a beating. She doesn’t have the strength to hit me. “If I had a gun,” she says, “I would kill you.”

I walk out of the room and go downstairs out to the porch. I stand outside and breathe deeply for ten minutes, waiting for the mountains and trees to calm me, for all that space to do its job and clear my head. Then I go inside, call her doctor, and tell the nurse what she said.

“You know how it is,” she tells me. “The last thing you remember, you were watching Gone with the Wind on the movie channel and suddenly you’re standing in the produce section in your pink nightgown as if you’d walked all the way to Tara in a dream.”

She pauses again, for effect this time, to see if I’ve gotten the joke. I nod and smile. I appreciate her sense of humor. I take her hand but she complains my hand is too hot. I remind myself we’re not close. I shouldn’t expect anything new.

Being smart, my mother always said, was being able to devise solutions to whatever problem presented itself. I look out the window, watching the afternoon shadow thrown by the building slowly cross the grassy hill and ride along the fence. It’s sometimes hard to look at her, this dying stranger who bears no resemblance to my mother. I have no solution for this problem.

She explains her new strategy for dressing. “I just wear a flowered housedress. I’m always presentable when guests arrive. If I find myself in the hallway unexpectedly and don’t remember if I’ve thrown trash down the chute or I’m on my way to the laundry room, I’m still respectable.”

What if she threw her underwear down the trash chute instead of putting it in the washing machine? What if the theft of her underwear is about her virginity being stolen? I don’t say anything. Either way, how would it matter now?

She’s silent for a while, her eyes closed, breathing slowed. I realize she doesn’t know where she is. It’s dark in the room. I look at my watch. I look again at the photographs tacked up on the bulletin board, hung on the wall at the foot of her bed. My sister put them up in an effort to help recapture some of her memories. In one of them, a woman with abundant, brunette hair strikes a provocative pose with some man I don’t know. This is the mother I remember.

When she opens her eyes, I ask who the man in the photo is. She says, “Oh I don’t know. He doesn’t matter.” Decades dissolve in a flood of disinterest. Perhaps she never cared.

Her bed is backwards in the room, her head facing away from her roommate. The footboard is against the wall so she can lie in bed propped on pillows and watch her own TV. She’s on her fourth roommate since she’s been in the nursing home. The others have all died.

A few of my mother’s precious things remain from the last thirty years of frenzied collecting. Enamel plaques of stylized stone flowers bought in Hong Kong hang on the wall to the left of her bed. The hand-painted lingerie dresser with its scrolled brass drawer pulls stands to the right of the television and holds dozens of pairs of colorful socks rolled into balls. Her upholstered rocker faces the television, away from her roommate. And, of course, there are the frilly French unmentionables in a box under the bed, the underwear she never wears anymore.

A nurse complained to me a few months ago that the patient insisted on wearing several pairs of adult diapers at the same time. My mother is clearly planning a quick getaway. If the prince pinned to the wall comes to her rescue, she’ll be ready to fly the coop, an expression of hers that always made me imagine fluttering wings and a snowstorm of feathers.

“When I lived in Hawaii, we called these dresses muumuus,” she says suddenly, picking up the thread of her own thought. “Muumuu is the perfect word,” she tells me. “You want to murmur something soothing when you’re wearing them.”

She drifts off and I sit there, empty of thoughts, incapable of solving the problem of death.

“Have you told her you forgive her?” the hospice nurse asks when she bustles in for a vitals check.

“As much as I can,” I say and don’t even ask how she knows I’m supposed to perform this ritual. We are all priests now, absolving those who trespassed against us so they may go to heaven unburdened.

Is there an invisible tattoo on my forehead that marks my tribe—those who must forgive before death? Perhaps it’s a pictogram, or a spiky hieroglyphic of fear, rage, and sorrow. Perhaps the clue is in how far I sit from my mother’s bed.

The nurse places her fingers on the inside of my mother’s wrist. “Thready,” she says as if I know what that portends. “You should tell her it’s okay to go.”

“Don’t let that woman vacuum under the bed,” my mother mutters, opening her eyes.

I giggle. It’s too late now to distress her with questions about her childhood, too late to ferret out the story of the thief who comes in the night and steals her most private things. I turn away from this thought again. I can’t bear the effort of hating anyone today.

She tells me she put a few of her best undergarments under the sofa cushions. “When I sleep on the sofa, no one will be able to get them.”

“Perfectly logical,” I say.

She looks at me with some alarm, as if she had forgotten something critical, or was suddenly afraid. “Did Willie call?” she asks for the third time in three days.

I shake my head, no. Willie died years ago, but I don’t say that. Instead I tell her I can stay a while longer. I pour water from the pitcher into her glass, place the tip of my finger over the top of the straw and watch the water being sucked upward by the vacuum into the straw. I hold the straw near her lips, slowly dripping water into her mouth.

She sips, licks her lips, and turns her face away. “That’s enough,” she says. She hasn’t eaten for three weeks. She asks if I’m hungry and offers to ring for an ice cream.

I shake my head, no. I don’t need anything. “Tell me about the muumuus.”

“Never be unkempt in front of strangers,” she declares. “It was the Depression, I was the ninth child. My mother could have cared less what happened to me. She never had time for me. I just tagged along behind Willie.”

This is her refrain. I’ve heard it all my life. I’ve never known what to do with the information. When I was a child, she used to tell me my clothes were clean and paid for. It was a point of pride, something to use as a rebuttal when attacked. We expected to be attacked. We had contingency plans. I realize now she gave me a weapon she didn’t have when she was young: clean clothes.

I offer her water again, putting the straw to her mouth. It dribbles down her chin. I blot her mouth with a white tissue. “Oh, excuse me, my mouth just isn’t where it should be,” she says. “Something always falls out.”

It’s an old joke. I smile. We are people who spill things. Our minds are always somewhere else.

“They’re killing people here,” she says. “Strange things happen. I’ve tried to tell my daughter about them but she just says, ‘Oh, Mom, I’m sure that’s not true.’ My daughter thinks she can talk me out of believing what I know.”

I nod slightly. She’s right. I used to think I could talk her out of her paranoia. I’ve reformed. Paranoia is what happens to you when you’re haunted by evil as a child, taken by it, violated at will. The past makes you vigilant. There are signs of imminent danger everywhere. I see what she sees. People are dying. The only effective plan here is escape.

“There was that fire when we all had to be evacuated,” she reminds me.

That wasn’t here. She has flipped to four years ago. Time, distance, and space are irrelevant. In a blink, memory sets one thing against another, rearranging the narrative’s atoms, changing its species and genus.

Years ago, her apartment building was evacuated in the middle of the night because of a fire that started in her kitchen. I wonder if all memories are like this, a kernel of fact around which nacreous layers of invention are secreted.

She goes back to her underwear, the recurring melody of her old age. She tells me I need to be wary of the woman who comes to clean because she’ll want to vacuum under the bed.

“My daughter is in cahoots with the cleaning woman,” she says. “She can’t wait to get her hands on my things.”

She’s quiet again for a while, her eyes closed. Her breathing is what the nurse calls shallow. Her arm is icy cold when I touch it. I pull the cover up over her legs. My mind wanders. I think about what I’ll prepare for dinner and make a shopping list in my head. Later I wonder if this is a defense mechanism, my way of escaping.

“You need to be careful about telling your daughter everything,” she says in the barest whisper. I startle.

“I can tell you that daughters come and go around here. You can hear them walking the hallway if you lower the sound on the television. Up and down the hallway they walk, as if they were waiting for someone to give birth. I’m sure you know about giving birth.”

She gives me the once over, able to tell by looking at me whether I’ve succeeded in that department. I’ve given up reminding her she has grandsons. Perhaps she remembers for a minute and then another memory whisks her away.

She turns her head and looks out into the hallway. “Is Willie coming?”

I surrender and nod. “He’s on his way,” I say.

I stroke her arm. She sleeps for a bit, or does what passes for sleep, the cells of her body straying into the air around her. I tell her it’s okay to go. I think about who she is, her obstinacy, her determination to save the last shreds of her dignity, and correct my statement.

“It’s okay to go, Mom, if you want to.”

The nurse comes in for rounds and another semblance of taking her patient’s vitals. They are charting the countdown, the soul’s liftoff into the ether. I tell myself I am inured to this. I gather my things to go and my mother wakes abruptly, turns her head and looks at me in panic, wordless, her eyes wide with terror, her mouth open without sound.

“I’ll be back,” I say from the door. “Don’t worry.” I still haven’t said I forgive her. I’m working up to it, debating with myself about the utility of forgiveness. The words hang heavy in my chest like an obligation.
I wave goodbye from the door. Holding my breath, I walk quickly through the halls to the back door on the lower level. I punch in the code to release the door lock. All my focus is on escape. Outside, I exhale and take deep breaths of the cold March air. I open all the windows in the car and leave them open the entire drive home to shed the smell of impending death.

Four hours later the nurse calls. “She’s gone,” she says. Her voice quavers.

My mother has flown the coop and all that will be left are feathers in a box under the bed.

Genny Fite earned degrees from Rutgers University and Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of the Sam Lagarde mystery/thrillers Cromwell’s Folly, No Good Deed Left Undone, and Lying, Cheating & Occasionally Murder. Her chapbook of poems, The Last Thousand Years, was published by Loyola College.

Delmarva Review publishes compelling new writing from authors within the region and beyond. In it’s eleventh year, the nonprofit literary journal is supported by individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. For information and book copies, visit: www.delmarvareview.com.

The way Mike Elzey, owner of Mike Elzey’s Guitar Studio, sees it, learning to play an instrument, such as guitar, can only make you a good guitar player. Which is why he hopes to inspire his students with something he can’t really teach them; the talent to become musicians. In the process, Elzey feels they will also pick up valuable life lessons.

“Some kids have never played music with others and when they do they learn social skills and how to compromise. “During class, I’ll hear: ‘I don’t like Johnny’s song,’ and I tell them, ‘Well, Johnny doesn’t like your song selection either, get over it so you can just play.’ Kids today are used to doing their own thing. We’ve become too fragmented. I’d like to change that.”

The change, he wants to be involved in is to offer instructions in a multitude of instruments (including voice), motivate his students to form a band, and find them a showcase where they could perform. That is the reason, Elzey says, he started the band camps with help from other talented musicians, including Jordon Stanley and Quinn Parsley.

“The problem,” Stanley says, “is that the musicians in our community are all over 25 years of age. There is no place where those who are younger can go to be motivated.” Stanley was inspired to pick up drums after watching the movie Drumline when he was 9, an age he considers ‘pretty late to start.’ He’s never stopped playing and now, besides being a studio musician, performs in church and with several bands including the Front Porch Orchestra, and Blackwater.

Parsley, also plays with the Front Porch Orchestra, for theater productions, at Christ Church of Easton, and for “anyone who is paying.” He knows the importance of working with young musicians. “It’s a great outlet through which children can express themselves.” A multi-instrumentalist, Paisley began playing at 15 after his parents bought him an acoustic guitar for $5 at a yard sale. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Salisbury University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in classical guitar.

Elzey’s love of music began at an early age, as well. He remembers attending a battle of the bands in high school when he was 14 and watching the reaction of the crowds. He ended up joining the group. “Suddenly, I went from nothing to a Rock Star.” He knew, even then, that this something he wanted others to experience.

Despite Elzey’s talent and interest, once school ended he married and accepted a position in a start-up manufacturing company. He filled the musical void by teaching guitar to a few students and playing with a band on the weekend. After many successful years that included a corporate merger, he decided to make a change. “I knew I wanted to give something back to the community. My wife and I didn’t have kids, but it was clear to me that anything I did would have to involve children and music. I used the business skills I acquired in my previous job, gave myself 6 months to succeed at the end of which I had 25 students. We hired another teacher, and a year later we had more students than we could handle.” That was 30 years ago.

Currently, Elzey owns two studios in Cambridge and two in Easton, while also teaching at Seaford Music in Seaford, Delaware and performing in local area bands. But, it is the future that excites him the most, a future that will allow him to introduce the love of music to his students.

This is no easy task. At a time when nationwide there is a decline in the number of children learning to play guitar, bass, drums, or keyboards. When songs are being recorded using computerized instruments and autotuned voices, and children are busy with other activities. “We can’t compete with video games, and we can’t compete with sports. If the child does not have the drive or the passion, parents don’t make their kids practice the homework we give them,” says Stanley.

Instilling that drive and passion is what it is all about for Elzey, one child at a time. This is how it usually happens, he says: “Gina sings and likes Nirvana, Ryan plays guitar loves Nirvana and is learning their songs and Eli drums to Green Day who everyone likes. And I think, let’s get you guys together.” That’s how his school was invited to play at Talbot First Night and how a band called Jinxed was formed and how they all played at the Avalon Theater to an appreciative audience. And that’s why the school has been invited to the Caroline Summerfest in Denton in August. “I want other kids to see our musicians and get inspired, as I did. I want to hear: ‘mommy, I want to play drums, too. ‘ ”

Says Parsley. “I enjoy working with younger musicians because it allows me to help build an even stronger musician community for the future. It also allows me to show music to kids that they may have never heard. They may run into such classic bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, but there are many great lesser-known bands out today that also deserve appreciation like Vulfpeck, Whitney, and Moon Child. Through learning how to play music, kids can also gain a greater appreciation for the artistry that goes into making the music they like.”

Elzey agrees. “Quinn and Jordon are younger and have a different perspective. I’ve got great help, I’ve got great space and we’re all ready. What we all agree on is that if we can get kids involved in a band and with other musicians, they grow to love their instrument. It’s my mission to do all we can to encourage and promote children playing instruments Maybe we can make a difference in the community. I want to look back and know we’ve made a difference; I want to see people in our community say: ‘look at all the musicians we have here.’ “

Summer Music camps are being offered throughout the summer.

Val Cavalheri is a recent transplant to the Eastern Shore, having lived in Northern Virginia for the past 20 years. She’s been a writer, editor and professional photographer for various publications, including the Washington Post.

Over the last several decades, there have been countless studies done on the positive impact of teaching horseback riding skills to a full range of emotionally or intellectually challenged children. From those who have Down’s Syndrome, autism, or physical disabilities, these young people have shown extraordinary improvements in confidence, patience, and personal self-esteem after working with horses for even a short period.

St. Martin’s Ministries in Ridgely, who provides families, and particularly women and children, with the basic needs of food, clothing, and housing for the Mid-Shore region, wanted to use this technique to accomplish similar results for their residents and have been able to recently team up with Talbot Special Riders with a grant from the Women & Girls Fund this summer to make that happen.

The Spy sat down with Beth Spurry, who has served on the Women & Girls Fund Board of Directors for more than a decade, and who currently co-chairs the Fund’s grant committee, to talk about how such a small investment can yield such positive results.

We also talk to the St. Martin’s new executive director, Deborah Vornbrock, about the organization’s mission, and its partnership with Women & Girls Fund, to provide this unique opportunity for women at risk.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. For more information about St. Martin’s Ministries please go here

This is the eighth in a series of stories focused on the work of the Women & Girls Fund of the Mid-Shore. Since 2002, the Fund has channeled its pooled resources to organizations that serve the needs and quality of life for women and girls in Caroline, Dorchester, Kent, Queen Anne’s and Talbot Counties. The Spy, in partnership with the Women & Girls Fund, are working collaboratively to put the spotlight on twelve of these remarkable agencies to promote their success and inspire other women and men to support the Fund’s critical role in the future.

While the Mid-Shore’s Dennis Powell has agreed (and is honored) to be one of the featured artists at the Academy Art Museum’s famed Crafts Show this coming October, he still recoils slightly at being called an artist or even a craftsman.

That’s because his product, the simple American cast iron pan, is the result of an intensive manufacturing process that involves approximately 180 workers in a Pennsylvania foundry to produce his small run of some of the most remarkable cooking skillets in the world.

It also might be due to the fact that Powell started his company as the result of trying to solve an engineering problem rather than one of aesthetics. When his grandmother’s skillet from the 19th century finally cracked in 2013, his journey began to recreate somehow an ancient process in manufacturing cast iron pans that would have a surface similar to his grandmother’s; so smooth that scallops could be sautéed without seasonings or oil.

Dennis Powell has taken several years of study, and more than a few bucks, to follow this passion. With the support of an encouraging spouse, he started a project that would eventually bring a product of near perfection to market in 2016  as Butter Pat Industries, which offers for skillet sizes for some of the best-known chefs in America as well as “in the know” home cooks.

The Spy sat down with Dennis near his Easton Airport office to talk about cast iron, engineering, and the distinctive art and craft (Sorry Dennis) that comes with pan manufacturing.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about the Academy Art Museum’s Crafts Show for 2018 please go here.