Harwin

My mother builds stone piles when life feels chaotic. I find them on the desk in the window. At the center of the kitchen table. Beside my bed, under the lamp on the nightstand. I think it’s her way of helping me see myself in the world, a small visual cue for courage when the well is depleted. Not a gusher that well, even on the best days. For me, anyway. I envy people with tappable reserves.

Strips of sunlight slip through the window shades and knife the bed diagonally. I yank the chord and yellow warmth comes flooding in. Joy bringer, skin kisser. A smile lingers in my mind but avoids my blank face. Exhale. I rifle through plastic bins in the closet and stuff my volleyball bag full of all the things. Shorts, gym shoes, kneepads. Voluntary practices started two weeks ago; there’s just a week and a half before our first game. Those I’ve had to organize myself – captain duties reach into summer. We’re good, not great; mostly I dig balls that look beyond saving. What I really love is smashing. Saving points draws murmuring approval. Smashing kills draws real applause.

I reach into the shower and get the jets going. Cautious, stone eyes in the mirror. I undress and ease in; it’s far too hot and my skin burns. I twist the nozzle and recoil. Washing my hair, I turn the handle over and the temperature plummets, penetrating down to the bone. I love the shock of it. It’s like a little game; how long can I last? It’s almost suffocating, my lungs and body screaming. I rinse the conditioner and shampoo; it’s swirling, swirling, disappearing down the drain. I wiggle my toes to find I’m still here. I towel off and leave my reflection behind.

Things in unexpected places: my apple watch jammed in a forgotten sneaker. three half-full glasses of water in the closet, like a memory-disordered person constantly forgetting then recalling their thirst. And mom’s credit card on the nightstand, a surprising yes to my pleas for a new skirt, not yet returned to her. She herself a thing in an unexpected place.

Mom grew up in coastal Virginia – a world away from Harwin, Missouri. For a short period, she lived in a decrepit beach cottage while her father worked and saved for something more substantial. Grandpa Lon was a civil engineer – your typical roads and bridges guy, but some special projects too. Mom says every now and then he’d split to Arlington for weeks at a time. Never could discuss it with any detail – the defense department cut big checks and valued discretion; being unbuttoned about your affairs there might just cinch the money spout. Anne was a homemaker but also a hustling busybody the way mom tells it, a Jackie Carter of all trades. Made soaps and candles to sell at the Sunday market. Had a minor cut-and-sew business crafting patterned dresses for new moms and their little girls. She traveled weekends, my mother in tow, to earn cash drawing blood donations, tying and locating veins, pricking with needles and extracting the carmine within.

After a few years they had enough to raze the cottage and build something they were proud of. Sleek lines and a flat roof. A design office for Lon with a maple drafting table that had a winding crack he sealed with a mixture of liquid gold. Something about beauty in imperfection and breathing life into broken things that he picked up during his time in Osaka. A kitchen with a gas range for Anne, all the plates and cutlery ordinary minus the sterling silver teapot and a four-set of copper mugs for drinks with guests. She had a dark room where she developed film too. Outside, a wood deck for summer grilling and countless card games that inevitably devolved into shouting competitions. Good-natured shouting competitions. Or not, depending on who you ask.

She and grandma would walk the beach each morning, collecting sand dollars and making magic wands of splintered sticks washed ashore. Her eyes fill with longing when she recalls those memories – the rising sun and glowing dawn, the waking Atlantic sky, cloudless, like a linen bedsheet stretched over the horizon.

“It was a time to think, but mostly it was a time to feel. Your grandmother often wouldn’t say anything at all; we’d hold hands for a while and then I’d go dashing ahead. When I turned back to find her, she’d have her toes in the waves and her gaze pointed towards heaven, her body seeking warmth, like an ivy with an endless affinity, twisting towards the light.”

What did you do on your walks? I asked her.

“I liked searching for odd-shaped stones and shells with pretty colors. Your grandma kept me out of the muck, but so long as it was dry I was free to roam. I’d stash them in my shorts pockets, or if it was Sunday before church, in the inner pouch of my dress. There was a pier that we designated end of the road. Beneath it I assembled my stones into pyramids, just beyond the reaching foam fingers of the tide. Every night they’d be swept away and every morning I built them new.”

When she was five years old a hurricane barreled through and devastated the community. Leveled everything. Laid it all flat.

“We stayed. I think if your grandpa knew how bad it was gonna be, we’d have left. But the weather reports weren’t so good back then. And it was Virginia, we always caught the tail-end of storms, hardly ever anything with real teeth. So we boarded up and stuck it out. I’d never been so scared.”

What was it like?

“I remember howling wind berating the windows even though we’d boarded them all up; a couple of them shattered from the vibrations. Lashing rain, just ferocious, that came down in diagonal sheets. In the streets vehicles were swept sideways like kid’s toys into the marsh. Hard to believe. Fords and Chevy’s plunged into the mud, the water rising, their leather interiors submerged and stinking and rotten. Telephone poles snapped, the wires severed; they hissed and thrashed like wild snakes, spitting showers of electric blue sparks. There was no power for two weeks. The local station was severely damaged and crews deployed from Norfolk struggled to navigate impassable roads. Across the street and down the way, the Stanek’s had a tree crash through their living room roof. Another cleaved the Warner’s garage in two.”

What did people do? I asked.

“God, whatever they could. The town operated shelter and response centers from the high school gym and the town hall’s auditorium. They set up army cots and disbursed two hot meals per day. If you were affected you made sure that your family was safe and you slept and ate. If you were able, you volunteered at the centers or set to work clearing your property or your neighbor’s once the storm died. Business owners had insurance claims to file and government aid to apply for. A lot of people lost everything. The elementary school took heavy damage and wasn’t operational again until the following spring. All the kids, me included, had to be bussed two towns inland for class. Some didn’t return at all; their families simply packed and left.”

Her eyes suddenly sad.

“I remember vividly one boy searching for his dog on the beach in the days after. He was a few years older than me but I remember the level of distress. His eyes were red and puffy and sunken in his skull like he hadn’t slept in years. He was shaking. His black labrador he was looking for, I can’t remember the name. He didn’t even have a picture of him; his house had been thrashed and all their photographs flooded or blown away. And he only had the rest of the day to look – his mother and father were busy packing the car with the things they had left. They were driving to Texas to stay with family and weren’t returning. I told him I hadn’t seen any labradors. He drifted down the beach like a ghost. Texas is a long way to drive without your best friend.

What did you guys do?

Exhaustion in her voice. “Helped as best we could. Mom distributed food stuffs and read to kids in the auditorium. Dad worked with the city in the years after to improve drainage systems and fortify infrastructure against future storms. Mostly we felt guilt that our home survived; a few scratches for sure but basically unscathed. It was a new build and dad prepped her hard. We had to tear down and rebuild the deck but that was nothing compared to our neighbors. I mean, people really did lose everything. Some only a few hundred yards away.”

But you were too little to help. What did you do mom? Do you remember?

“Well, I remember that we picked up our morning walks, grandma and I, as soon as it was safe again. We didn't know what else to do with ourselves. So much rubble and ruin: side paneling and roof shingles ripped from homes. Outdoor decks shredded like matchsticks and strewn about the sand. Beach chairs twisted in metal tangles, halfway buried, poking their heads like zombies, others bobbing out in the black surf. Bricks, Harper, heavy mason bricks from fire pits hoovered up and whipped around like they were pebbles. And the pier, Christ. Half gone, the other half collapsed and pulverized, in pieces like it had been jammed through an enormous chipper. Things that didn’t belong there, things people surely missed. Photographs in shattered frames. Chinaware broken in jagged edges, cobalt porcelain ink disrupted, the beautiful illustrations all lost. Only one I came across intact, a lighthouse on the beach and gulls soaring over the cliff edge. In the dunes below, a little girl holding hands with her mother. A ring too, a silver ring with a red stone that reflected the purest portraits when glimpsed from above. Mom collected it and put an ad in the paper but it went unclaimed. She put it in the windowsill in the kitchen, a glinting eye to watch over us all. An eye like a hurricane.”

Did you keep building your stones?

Her voice wobbly. “Yeah. I started building them under the bluff; that seemed like some minimal protection, better than the open exposure of the beach and the sadness of all the debris, even after it had been cleared or blown out to sea.” Even gentler: “I didn’t want to quit because everything was ruined. It was our home.”

Her gaze far away, in Virginia, in 1983.

“There was something funny that happened though. With the stones and the pier.”

What?

“Actually, it was amazing.”

What was?

“Well, like I said, it was completely downed. And your grandma didn’t want me slinking through there because things were sharp and maybe I’d duck under a half-snapped beam right when it decided to go. But I begged her; I’m not sure why. I could see a path that cut through clear to the other side and I pleaded with her to walk through it just this once. And she agreed. I was shocked, even now, I still am. She was such a careful, disciplined person.”

What did you find?

“Something I couldn’t believe. It was the stone pile that I’d built before the storm hit. It survived. Not a single stone disturbed. Debris everywhere, wood and vinyl and cement and steel from the structures above. It was cocooned by all that stuff and ravels of shoreline vegetation.”

Her gaze still in the distance.

“It was like a little miracle. It withstood all that violence.”

So what did you do?

She shakes her head, warped time bending back to the present with me. “Me? Nothing. I was shocked. Your grandmother spoke though.”

And said what?

“That the universe speaks. All of these homes and buildings and the pier destroyed but my little stones standing tall. She told me it’s the ones we least expect that come out the other side of a hurricane.”

Wow.

“And you know what else she said?” Her eyes with her mother, a little girl caught in wonder, wondering why the universe was speaking to her.

What?

“It’s the storm in them that lets them survive the storm out there.”

My dresser top is messy, chaotic. It’s uncharacteristic, the consequence of an occupied mind. The laundry I folded yesterday that leaned at a precarious angle has toppled over, bras and tanks and a charcoal gray sweatshirt. A wooden jewelry box open and the contents mixed and tangled like glimmering innards, wristlets clung to necklaces and mismatched earrings sprinkled throughout. An open tube of coral pink lipstick dried out and long past saving. There’s an orange tinge in the air now, sodium vapor light; it’s crowding out the lemon wash.

So many storms to endure in the business of living. What an old thought, one that’s jarring because, plainly, I’m not old. How many stone piles assembled to summon courage? Courage we’re sure doesn’t exist.

Dad for me when I fell from the oak tree in the front yard the summer before eighth grade and snapped my arm like a twig, bone poking through the skin. Completely healed and harmless in the grand scheme of things, but some innocence lost, as well as the months of July and August, all my friends galivanting, posting pictures. Me stewing, confined to watching tv in the basement, a pity party of one, pouting because everyone had abandoned me.

Mom for dad, every day for months when his friend Lucas was killed in an auto accident just a half-mile from his home, a maintenance vehicle with its bucket extended too high and a bridge collision that shanked two tons of metal directly upon the roof of his car. The jaws of life pried him free but the internal damage was too great.

And grandma Anne for mom. Fuck. When she lost the baby. I don’t like to think about it; even brief recollections make my heart sore. I was too young to understand the implications at the time. But I felt the gravity. The emotional obliteration. Weeks in the hospital from the medical complications. Wheeling her out of there weak and mute and shellshocked, the bombs still going off in her head. Her heart strings severed, me not understanding at all, insisting on sitting in her lap and dragging hot wheels across her arms and face. She holed up in her room. Wouldn’t eat. She wailed a ghastly, guttural cry that withered everything in its path. Or she wouldn’t speak for days, which was somehow worse.

Grandma washed her. Knitted next to her in silence. Built her stone piles and spoke of storms and hurricanes and absorbed the rage that spewed out in personal, attacking torrents until finally her skeletal daughter took the smallest of nibbles from a grilled cheese. Hollow eyes like she was dead. She was dead; I understand that now. Dead as anyone living can be. Agonizingly, slowly upward from there.

I wrestle jeans over my hips. Skinny like a string bean, pretty but far from voluptuous. French fries and pizza still go to my face and tummy, never my tits or ass. Mom says that will reverse in my twenties and I should be careful what I wish for. We’ll see.

Amidst the mess is a photo of Anne and Lon in courtship, when they were young and sharp and beautiful. He’s taking her hand, holding the door while she exits the sleek Packard, one leg extended, the other still folded neatly under her hip. It was his dad’s car and mom says he must have worked non-stop, a month straight in old Wally’s shop to let him take it out on a date. She’s got on a slouchy cardigan and white floral skirt. Him, a collared shirt and fine-knit varsity sweater. Her smile is steely and whimsical. In her hair, tied loosely, is a bright blue bow.

A silver hoop on my wrist and a streak of eye liner. Then I lace a bow in my hair as well, bright blue, a nod to the woman who birthed the woman before me. Something my mother has always said that I love: We embody the people that love and take care of us all our lives.

There’s one other thing among the mess of my dresser: a tiny cairn. High demand for courage – it’s the first day of senior year. There’s a storm swirling, and no, it’s not just my insides churning. Harwin is a shark tank and it's easy to feel like a minnow.

Like now. Because of what happened two nights ago, in the train yard. The night I ripped a shot of vanilla vodka, kissed the mirror with wet lips and followed my friends into the drunken, gooey madness.

author note: this story was written entirely by hand and mind without the assistance of AI. It is intended for the personal use of this reedsy audience and is not to be included in any training datasets without compensation and consent.