PRIVATE HAUNTINGS(Susan Joyner-Stumpf) PRIVATE HAUNTINGS


What have you longed for piteously in this world? Known only its fleeting tenure; its brief, brisk feather against your tingling skin, reminding you how it “used to be.” Leaving you with insurmountable, unfathomable nostalgic ache as painful as a body flu. I have known its touch like an exotic lover who could not stay. Giving you ecstasy you’ve never before known, but then slipping silently, forever, away. Never to see (experience) them again in reality as you know it. In memory they visit, only. Taunting at the heart and soul-strings, just long enough to get you riveted and uncomfortable, and infinitely sad, once again. And nothing has ever come along as comparable replacement and you’re left with merely teasing tendrils of this faintest, unrelenting reverie that comes back to haunt you, when you least expect.

People can do this. Animals, even. Or inanimate objects, places. A river, for instance, could do this. The river I grew up on as a child, the Tangipahoa River in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, where we had a summer home for years an hour outside of New Orleans. That river watched me grow from a child into an awkward, shy girl, into reluctant womanhood. I guess I thought it would always be there in my life and I would dismiss her currents in my veins ~ like, I will feel this again, no need to take it all in now. I will feel her cool liquid blanket against my body as I water skied and tubed down to the main beach. Laughter drifting in the air. Catfish doing somersaults in front of us. I thought that lazy river would always be there, but life gets in the way, doesn’t it? Unfortunately. My parents sold her when my brother and I were a little older and on our own. They never asked us did we want to inherit it. They just told us matter of factly one inconsequential day that we could no longer go there because they sold “a part of our lives to strangers” and it was like they ripped pieces of raw flesh from our vulnerable chests. My brother and I just stood numbed and shocked to the core, looking back and forth between each other and them, like, how could you do this to us?

I don’t think my brother Bobby and I ever forgave our foster parents for that dastardly deed. I know personally, I didn’t. I never looked at them the same, like the time they sold my childhood toys (dolls and stuffed animals) at some stupid garage sale without my consent. I cursed the heavens ~ telling them my “childhood things,” my memories, were priceless to me, and yet they sold them for pennies on the dollar, I’m sure. Now some new, indifferent generation sits on a cold floor playing roughly with my Barbie doll or my stuffed Bull Dog with the name “Tuffy” embroidered across his black turtle-neck sweater. Unforgivable.

I ache for that river. I ache for “Tuffy,” as silly as that sounds. And I ache all the more, now that my parents and my brother have passed on and I’m alone in this world with merely my husband and our four-legged children (horses, dogs, cats). My husband Howard didn’t know me then, when I knew that river and it knew the course and depths of me. He didn’t know me on the cold, rainy nights when I was seven years old clutching “Tuffy” in bed against my trembling heart because I was afraid of the cracking thunder outside my window. Howard was unaware of the little girl who spent endless hours dressing and re-dressing Barbie so she would look breathtaking to poor Ken. No one can give that all back to me and every now and then, when life gets too much, and I sit alone on a craggy mountain crop where I live now in Colorado, far from my Southern roots of New Orleans, an ache comes over me that is so physically painful that I break into trembles and sobs that rack my body almost over the precarious cliff edges.

It would be different if, perhaps, I still had my family around, but I don’t. I have my husband Howard who loves me, but doesn’t understand that I am made up, yes, of flesh and blood like anyone else, but on the other hand, a “river runs through it,” runs through my blood sure enough as the DNA that defines me indistinctly from the rest of Earth’s mortals. What else runs through me is a childhood cut short because the memories were sold. I should still have Tuffy sitting prominently in my office, on a shelf, where I can look at him from time to time, and remember how he once protected the child in me. I should still possess the dolls that lightened my world and all the things that grew up alongside me. I should still call the Tangipahoa River home and go to her whenever I feel the need to be re-fixed of all she meant to me. But I’m a drug addict in withdrawal, forever seeking her, with painful shakes from being forced to live in abstinence.

And sometimes we are forced to say goodbye to things we never thought we would have to let go of. Sure we grow up. But do we totally grow out of who we were, and where we felt “safe?” No. All my family: my foster parents, foster brother, all died unexpectedly, before their time, and there was never the closure in saying things you wanted them to know in this life; I never told them goodbye. Staring back at their blank, cold faces, they were just another memory sold without my permission or consent and I felt a little resentful. And yes, God and I have had talks about this, like, why am I still here and yet my family has perished and everything with it? How can I go on?

I look out across the mountains. From my vantage point, I can see Pikes Peak, her snow-capped summits piercing the blue Colorado skies. That’s the reason I am here, because I love the mountains. I am here and I left New Orleans because I am inspired by mountains whose peaks I will never touch, only admire from a distance, the multi layers planted in the horizon bed. With family gone, and just Howard and our animals in this world, I will hold on to that and not let it go . . . and never sell this moment to anyone. I clutch the air bravely, my corduroy jacket unbuttoned to accept the onslaught of frozen air to my exposed neck and thin-lined shirt beneath. I want to feel the pain here, the raw temperatures entering me, slicing through my mortality, and I won't be afraid to accept it; and I won’t be afraid to lose it, though it won’t be because I let it go. It would have to let go, first.

I’ve come a long way, Tuffy; you would be proud of me.



© Susan Joyner-Stumpf

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