joni_mitchell_never_lies tender square my mother has this daily ritual of sending old photographs to my younger sister and i every morning through text. i don’t know how long ago she began doing it, but it’s become a constant i set my day to, and it gives me insight into her moods. sometimes the pictures are of brea and i as kids, hamming it up on film; sometimes it’s selfies of my mom and dad grinning widely with their growing grand-babies; other times my mother snaps prideful pics of her garden—lush purple hydrangea in sunlight and moonflowers unfurling at dusk; but my favorites are the photos from her own childhood and that of my father’s, images in soft focus with muted colors that often mark the past. these are the scenes that invite questions, reminders of all i do not know. *** it’s shot on a diagonal, the row of three or four homes, stretching from the center left to the top right corner of the photo. the latter homes are pale copies of one another, with long porches tucked beneath their sloped roofs, except for the first, which is a darker brick and has an enclosed front entrance with a gabled roof. half of dirty a studebaker sits in the foreground, slumping in the lower right corner. the sky is overcast in that way that looks blank. telephone wires intersplice with the bare branches of trees and there’s melting snow or hard frost on the ground. there are no figures in the picture. it’s in black and white so it could be from the 50s, maybe even earlier, but there’s no way to be certain; the photo isn’t from my parent’s collection. (work in progress -- more to come) 210810 ... tender square my father found the photo on the town of tecumseh’s facebook page; someone had shared it there and he recognized the scene, showed my mother the photo, pointing to the second house, a place that was once theirs when they first got together. *** my parents met when my mom was eighteen. my dad was older by nine years and had already been married once, for about a week before the whole thing was annulled. he had two young daughters with another woman, carol, and they broke up after she refused to move away from their drug-dealing neighbors in the reginald projects. my parents met at a house party my dad was throwing for labor day. she had been set up with him by her roommate cheryl, who was going out with tommy, who was my dad’s roommate at the time. but my dad wasn’t informed of the arrangement and their first meeting flopped. in an effort to amend the bad impression he left, my father went to see my mother for a haircut at the golden razor where she worked, and i imagined her measuring his flaxen hair between her fingers while she trimmed, studying him through the reflection of her station mirror. for their first date he made her porkchops, mashed potatoes, and corn at his place. she met his two daughters for the first time, took a polaroid of them in the backyard smiling, dressed in their matching bright red sweaters, the overexposure makes their faces look angelic. they were living with my grandmother during the week while my dad worked days on construction sites and nights dispatching taxis. (more to come) 210905 ... tender square he didn’t tell my mother that the kids had been taken from carol after a shotgun blast tore through their bedroom floor while they slept. she didn't find that out until nearly 40 years after the fact. 210905 ... tender_square dad moved in with wayne and wayne’s brother kevin around february 1979. wayne had rented and lived in the white tecumseh house with his wife and kids, but his wife left him, which is why he needed roommates. mom had moved back to grandma’s around the same time after having been roommates with cheryl. but grandma gave mom an ultimatum and she chose to move in with dad, and wayne and kevin that may. “it was a great house,” my mom recounted. “the dining room was open and we used it as another living room, we had two or three couches. terri and candi came over for visits every weekend for about six hours on saturdays and sundays. we didn’t have sleepovers because it wasn’t a kid-friendly house—wayne and kevin liked to party.” during those parties, my parents stayed back in their bedroom together, they were in their own little world. “i guess that was our honeymoon time,” she said. “we’ve never ever had a home with just the two of us until now.” my parents would’ve stayed in that house had wayne been paying landlord instead of using their money for god knows what. they were all evicted that december. my parents got a house on riberty after that and candi and terri moved in with them. the house was razed years later; the knights of columbus was housed in the brick building next door and they owned the property. they tore my parent's first home down to expand their parking lot. * on the interior doorframe of my parent’s bedroom: a photo of my youthful mother with an 80’s perm, looking like baby from “dirty dancing,” some 40 years ago. her face is soft, her eyes rimmed in black liner, and she’s looking at something outside of the camera’s lens. above the picture is a note taped to the wall in my dad’s handwriting, which says, “you will always look like *this* to me, no matter how old both of us get. love, stu.” below the photo is a card with an illustration of a car parked at a waterfront view with a picnic basket and blanket arranged near the tires. robert browning is quoted under the scene: “grow old along with me, the best is yet to be.” my mother finally convinced my father to retire three years ago, after decades of being cast aside from him because of his work, and now we come to find out he has alzheimer’s. this is not the future she envisioned for the two of them. this is not the future she was promised. 211021 what's it to you? who go blather from