THE PANDORA EFFECT

by Mary T. Wagner

There are few true secrets in my life that haven’t at this point been told to someone. Still hidden from others, yes. But at least given voice once, and so their  power diminished.

What still astounds me, though, is how the act of writing, of putting words to paper where they can be seen and felt, triggers confessions to myself.  The hurts too sharp to acknowledge out loud, the dark places too deep to see beyond as they happen.

The power of this first became clear when I was only twenty-five.  I was a new yet still reluctant and disoriented mother.  A surprise pregnancy had ended my newspaper career prematurely, and I was now at home, a housewife caring for a baby and not knowing how, strapped for money, socially isolated, and deep in the grip of post-partum depression.  In other words, a writer in desperate need of a project to grab on to like a lifeline.

I decided I would try to mine the experiences of my family about ten years earlier, when my parents abruptly pulled up stakes and moved from Chicago, where I had grown up, to an abandoned farm in northern Wisconsin.  It seemed like fresh, light fodder for a series of essays that I could pitch to the local daily, or to a women’s magazine or two.

The farm was two miles removed from the nearest town of 146.  The last time it had been farmed was seven years before, and the disuse showed.  It had an unfinished red brick house with an earthen basement, a barn whose boards were weathered to a silver sheen, a dilapidated chicken coop, and an outhouse with a distinct tilt.  The gravel driveway, unprotected from winter’s blasts by either fence or tree line, was close to a quarter mile long.

My parents’ decision was something I had never questioned or thought deeply about.  If this is what life held, then I would meet it head-on.  Looking back, in my imagination I had burnished comic moments to a Green Acres sheen—funny, innocent, and above all, amusing. There were chickens in the basement, a pony in the barn, a cow that I learned to milk by hand, swallows in the rafters, purple clover sparkling with morning dew in the fields by the apple tree.

As my daughter lay sleeping in her crib and my husband worked at the office, I took a seat out of view in our small apartment, picked up a notebook and began to write. I made it about half a page.

With pen in hand and words appearing, I looked back at the scene with the eyes of a damaged yet wiser adult, rather than a child eager to please and full of unfounded faith that the adults leading the way had thought this upheaval through with an iota of sense or sanity between them in their headlong flight from the city.  I looked back, now uncomprehending, at the way my mother could spend her time happily pulling weeds in the hayfield while the house remained too derelict to bring anyone home to. I shuddered at the memory of the bathroom that stay unfinished for several years because the wall behind the toilet hookup needed to be plastered. I remembered sponge baths amid the clutter of the kitchen sink, and the filth and chaos of those chickens in the basement, removed from the barn because the severe cold had caused frostbite on the edges of their red, rubbery combs. I shook my head at the way my parents had purchased several livestock animals like toys before there were fences to contain them, and the enormous amounts of time wasted retrieving them as they repeatedly wandered farther afield. I remembered the uncertainty and isolation and poverty that defined our daily existence there in that melancholy looking red brick house, and felt a chill at the memory of carrying water from the house to the barn in the incredible winter cold that I will never erase from my mind.

I put the pen down and knew I would mine no more happy memories from that place. Survival had been my unknowing goal, and denial the deep-rooted character trait that had let me achieve it.

I sat, stunned at the revelation, my life changed, my memory altered, all by just picking up a pen and beginning to write.