Counting Satellites
Some inherit their mother's eyes. I inherited something else.
“There’s one!”
We’re lying on the cool grass in our backyard staring up at the stars. It’s late summer, and the trilling insect chorus nearly drowns out Mom’s excited voice. In the darkness, I follow where her finger points and, sure enough, there’s a tiny white light speeding across the sky, like some sort of star racing across the universe.
“How many is that for you?”
“Three!” she says with childlike excitement. “I’m winning!”
“No, Mom,” my brother Scott says. “Jon’s got five.”
Mom hmphs. “He’s cheating. He has binoculars.”
Jon, our neighbor, is five years my senior and heading off to UW-Madison in the fall. I like his quiet, thoughtful, scientific mind. Of the chaotic men and boys in his large family, Jon’s the black sheep. And that makes me think he’s the good one.
“I hate to break this to you,” Jon says, “But it’s actually harder to see satellites with binoculars. The ones I spotted were all with the naked eye.”
“Spoilsport,” Mom pouts. “I thought I was actually winning for a change.”
I reach over and clasp Mom’s hand in mine. “Three is really good,” I say. “I’ve only spotted one so far.”
Mom feels a little fragile these days. Just a couple of weeks ago, as I was returning from a walk down to the lake with my little brother Dustin, I heard shouting coming from our house. My parents didn’t get into loud squabbles often, but I knew what I had to do. I stopped in my tracks, placing a hand against my four-year-old brother’s chest and saying, “Let’s not go in yet, OK?”
We walked back down the road. “To check on the fish!” I’d said, making it seem like an adventure. But as we walked, I heard my Dad’s reedy tenor voice wailing, “You’re never home, Kathy! All my friends think you’re shacking up with some guy every weekend!”
We spent every weekend at my grandparent’s house, an hour away from our home by the lake, because Mom hated Cambridge. It was “cliquey” she said, and no matter how hard she tried to fit in, she never seemed to. So when the weekend came, we went back to her safe place, the place she’d always called home. There, Mom would make herself useful mowing the lawn with the big green John Deere, tackling Grandma’s little household projects, cleaning the garage.
And yes, sometimes flirting with the neighbor guy, Frank, whose own wife was a bit of a recluse and also named Kathy. Small world.
When we went to Grandma’s, sometimes we’d go to Oconomowoc for groceries and Mom would say, “Let’s go cruisin’.” We’d take the long way, around Oconomowoc Lake. As we drove, Mom would look up at the huge houses. One of her favorites was a mansion with a porte-cochère (although I wouldn’t learn that term until I was much older; I simply thought of it as a “carriage driveway”).
Mom seem to love imagining she lived somewhere else. Anywhere else. Every time we drove past the mansion—and it must’ve been hundreds of times—she would slow the car to a crawl and gaze across its expansive lawn. I could almost feel her imaging herself standing on its second story veranda in a gauzy sundress, one hand shading her eyes as she gazed out at the sunlight glimmering on the lake.
“Can you imagine?” she’d say with awe. “Can you even imagine living like that?”
But didn’t we sort of live like that? Our house is just up the road from Lake Ripley, and we can walk down and use the community pier whenever we want. Mom loves the lake. She waterskis behind our old boat, the one with the gold sparkles. We swim nearly every day in the summer.
Isn’t Mom happy with our boat, our house, our life in Cambridge?
* * * *
Ra and I roll up to the estate sale and they grab their UV light from the glove compartment. We have a couple of objectives. First, we’re going to look for antique uranium glass, which Ra has started collecting. Second, we get to snoop around what looks like a really cool old house.
The house is the draw for me. It always is. Part of it is my fascination with imagining the lives that went on in that place. I wander through, looking at the remnants of things someone gathered, possibly treasured.
I peer into a bedroom and see a story. A walker in the corner. An ancient bed with a metal spring and one of those nubby bedspreads. Paintings of ships and seascapes. A cross hung on the wall with a rosary draped over it.
“Catholic pirate,” I murmur.
Ra laughs. “But a walker? What’s wrong with a peg leg?”
I spot a photo of a German Shepherd in a little frame on the dresser. “Dog chewed it up,” I say, and we burst into irreverent laughter.
Then I pick up a pair of binoculars. Sturdy and black. Surprisingly heavy, as the good pairs always seem to be. I put them to my eyes and look out the window toward the lake, and suddenly I’m in our backyard in Cambridge counting satellites with Mom, Jon, and Scott.
Mom eventually found something resembling contentment.
By the time I’d left home, my family had moved back to Oconomowoc. It always seemed to me like the one place Mom considered home. Life certainly hadn’t been without its challenges, but as my parents grew older, they found themselves settled in a house Mom loved, a little Cape Cod. The house had been in the way of a freeway bypass, and my enterprising dad figured out a way to buy it and have it moved. There was great celebration after the house was set, unscathed, on its new foundation on my parents’ farm.
Mom had a house she was proud of. She decorated, painted, wrangled Dad into putting in new flooring, which always looked as if it had been installed by someone who really didn’t know how to install flooring. She went with me to nurseries and adopted my obsession with plants and growing things.
Mom spent a decade or so making that humble little house her home. Settling in. Feeling pride when people came to visit.
Having her Happy Place didn’t stop her from driving around the lake, though. She’d roll down the windows, inhale deeply, and say, “Smell the lake!” She’d always reminisce about Great-Grandma’s lake house, the one shed grown up visiting, and the one we’d lived in when I was small. We’d moved away from the lake when I was about 10, but I remembered watching fishing boats leaving the channel, the scent of the lake mingled with the pungent tang of boat fuel, the ping-ping-ping of a motor boat pulling a skier over the choppy waves.
As I set down the estate sale binoculars, I remember Mom coveting Jon’s, certain he had the satellite-hunting advantage even after he patiently explained that no pair of binoculars was going to help track a satellite screaming overhead at seventeen thousand miles an hour.
It occurs to me that I’m not all that different.
Here I am, wandering through a beautiful old house, admiring the soaring ceilings, the conversation pit, the orange shag carpeting wrapped around a cone-shaped Malm fireplace. I’ve already mentally moved in, and I’m playing the grand piano sitting beside floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a patch of woods.
“There were absolutely sex parties here,” I say.
Ra doesn’t hesitate. “Oh, a hundred percent.”
“The kinky swingers kind.”
“Definitely.”
“Chips, dips, chains, whips...”
They look at me blankly.
“You’ve never seen Weird Science?“
“I don’t think so.”
I sigh. “Well, I’ve failed as a mother.” They roll their eyes, smirking. They can quote The Princess Bride and So, I Married an Axe Murderer like a champ. They love Bill Joel and Fleetwood Mac. They know I raised them right.
As we wander from room to room, I notice something. I’m not imagining my furniture in these spaces, wondering what it would feel like to wake up and drink coffee on the deck, or imagining hosting Thanksgiving in the dining room.
I’m wondering who has. The walker tucked beside the bed. The rosary draped over the cross. The photo of the German Shepherd. Who laughed here? Who cried? Who sat awake at three in the morning wondering what came next? Who stood at these windows watching winter storms roll across the lake?
On the drive home, I catch myself looking at another house I’ve admired for years. An old Craftsman tucked beneath enormous oak trees, its yard delightfully, intentionally unruly. Through the front windows I catch a glimpse of warm light, rich woodwork, books, plants. For a split second I want to peek inside. But I don’t want the house so much as the story.
And that’s when I realize I’ve inherited something from my mom. She spent years imagining herself inside other people’s lives. The mansion on Oconomowoc Lake. The veranda. The view. The life she thought might make her happy.
I inherited the imagining, just not the longing. Instead of imagining my own life between those walls, I wonder what life was like for the people who reside there, or who once did.
Although, I wouldn’t resist a lovely Craftsman of my own if I had the means to get one.
These days, I live in a humble manufactured home on almost an acre in western Washington. It’s hardly the mansion Mom dreamed about when we cruised around Oconomowoc Lake. But when I watch birds on the back porch as Dodger, my scruffy muppet of a dog, tears around the yard menacing squirrels and rabbits, I feel I’ve arrived at a place where I belong. I don’t find myself wishing I were somewhere else.
Maybe Jon was right all along: The trick wasn’t having a badass pair of binoculars, it was simply learning where to look.
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