now reading: The Broken Girls

tenth

The back of houses they stick out into alleys naked and exposed. Flowers blindly bloom in gardens that have long been lost to forgotten ambition. The sidewalks slope and crack in too much of a hurry to stay down properly.

With it's newly cut grass and broken canopy of maple trees it smells like Harvard-Yale. But the display of blight, broken bricks, overgrown shrubs, houses divided like cake with too many front doors, and the aged apartment buildings that grow like weed vine among the homes, give it away for what it is; Sugar House.

Why did we did leave here? It was the question I asked myself the first day I slipped around the corner with the dog on a leash heading up one of the Avenues. I had waited on 11th East watching Beach turn the key, let herself into the front duplex for her cat sitting job. Once she was in I had about an hour to kill. So I went walking.

It was a temporary arrangement. One month, two times a week. At noon we would drive up 17th South; drive backward through time. It reminded me of the nanny job I took when Beach was 3.

A three-month commitment.  It too took Beach and me up the hill, a few hours, a few days a week, for a few months. Interlopers in someone else's life.  That one was a cold white house hanging high over the valley on the foothills.  I would drive the streets and park my VW van with the other cars of the workers.  For all the money and the mansions the only people home were the maids and the tradesmen... and the nannies.

From the first seconds of that job, I was homesick for the valley floor. I would pick up the 2-year-old daughter from nursery school. Drive her home. Feed her a lunch of carefully dictated leftovers. Let her watch one episode of Madeline, read her one book, put her down for a nap, then wait to be excused by the grandmother "who would take it from there".

In my memory, there is no sound. The rooms tucked in between marble and carpet and the privacy money can buy all lay in a silence that is almost dead. Surely haunted.

Sugar House is the opposite. Even the job flipped: it was Beach who was working while I wandered.

I would weave my way up and down the streets crossing my own history.  I would find myself staring into a yard, into blank windows, down long driveways. I imaged the people who lived in each house.  I pressed my feelings against the apartment houses and wondered what it would be like to live there- alone.  I cut down alleys over broken glass along leaning fences and off-street parking pads.

One day it was raining; we still walked. The dog, more than reluctant but I had a question to answer and time to kill.

Yesterday was the last day. I waited for Beach to get inside the apartment then I headed out to say good-bye to my afternoon sessions with Sugar House. Mailed a letter at the post office before setting off into the rows of houses that had become my backdrop.

Why did we leave Sugar House? For space, for land, for freedom.

I miss the idea of it sometimes. Miss the idea of clean uniformity of bricks and clapboards that trickles out of Harvard-Yale. It runs downhill splashing out into the streets around Sugar House Park, it dots the shopping district; drying out around 2nd East.
   
I don't miss the interlopers. The dog walkers. The pet sitters. The traffic. The trees that lean and the sidewalks that break. I don't miss the thick bungalow where it was always winter, even when the flowers were blooming.

We moved west to stand in a field as the sun came up.  We moved west to be able to leave our bikes on the front porch while going in for a glass of water and not come back to them gone without us. We moved because of property taxes and horrible neighbors and nowhere to park.

We moved west so we could go walking along the river.

"The house on tenth west liked junk.  We didn’t know it when we fell in love and bought it.  A realtor’s nightmare with dead animals mounted on the walls, overstuffed rooms, gaping valances, and dusty curtains.  The day we were shown the house we stepped around the piles, navigated rooms so full we were not allowed to open closed doors.

We bought her anyway and moved across town.  Down 1700 South over the tracks and through the industrial warehouses, onto a wide residential street that seemed to stretch forever.  We were in by Halloween.  Ripping up carpets, tearing down cabinets and curtains, stripped her bare and we all started over." ~Taming Venus, mlb

What else I hadn't known was that we would spend the next twelve years curing the house on Tenth of her need for possessions. And as much as we have changed her, she has changed us. Once we were a family of Sugar House refugees, a child of Harvard-Yale and a child of the world, moving from under the shadows of institutions like Dartmouth and the mighty U; we are not that anymore.

under 4 minutes and for a lifetime

If you add all the minutes together of the time a gymnast competes in a Meet it is under four minutes. 

Beach's vault is six seconds, her bar routine around thirty-six. Beam, is about a minute. Floor, around a minute thirty-six. 

Skills fade. 
Titles are forgotten. 

But what remains for a lifetime are the lessons.

Gymnastics is not about not falling. It's about how to get back up and keep going.

It's not about beating someone else. It's about winning with yourself.

It's not about being perfect or the best. It's about setting high goals and working to achieve them.  It's about bravery and leadership, good sportsmanship and responsibility. 

It's not about the medals or scores. 

It's about becoming someone you are proud to be.  

Gymnastics isn't simply a sport, done right, with the right coaches, it is the training ground for success for the rest of their lives.

Valley of Fire State Park

Regionals 2019

Let's start at the end with this photo snapped the split second before she saluted to take the Floor for her final rotation of the 2019 Region One Level 9 Regional Championships in Las Vegas, Nevada. Let's get the scores out of the way: Vault 9.775 2nd, Bars 9.225 7th, Beam 9.2 5th, Floor 9.575 2nd, All Around 37.775 1st, qualifying for Westerns.

They started as B flight on Vault. 

And as flight B tends to do, they finished on Floor with most of the meet already completed.

Beach didn't compete a "safety" vault. Normally, she competes a layout and a tuck-half. Before vaulting at Regionals they have to declare what vault they are competing to the judges via a number board. The coaches circled up the girls to make sure they knew their vault numbers. Beach's safety vault in warm-up had not looked good so she was asked, why not just compete 2 tuck-halves?

Her response was, "Okay. Do you want me to stick them too?" 

So she did. 

She also did the best bar routine she has done so far in Level 9.

She stayed on the beam when she was supposed to and got off, when and as planned.

Then she went to Floor and did what she loves to do.

This is the photo shot after she competed. After she was given ice for her back and she asked for a second bag which she gave to one of the other girls from another gym rotating with her and her teammates.

Then awards.

And Westerns Qualifiers for 4 age groups; Sr 3, Sr 4, Sr 7 

(2 of Beach's teammates also made Westerns in their age divisions)

Region One SR 4 Team for the 2019 Westerns Championships

The room, the photos, the phone calls "home".

And then back to the start. 

Out to the floor with her teammate who was competing alone in the final session.

Because that is who she is <3 

Beach Ries: Teammate

and Region One Level 9 Sr 4 All Around Champion

leftover stones

Sometimes in the night, I can feel it. Whatever noise from this side of the door that startled me awake vanishes, and a door from somewhere else opens.

It crawls like black water along the basement floorboards. Silty specks of black sand suspended in cold foam.

I sit up and listen.

Silence.

I roll over and drift between to-do lists and sleep. Then again, a noise, a memory, I sit up and try to feel the night. Is it out there? I return to tossing and turning.

It crawls up the stairs like tar. It seeps in around the bed, rising as high tide in a shallow marina. The bed, a rowboat in the sea.

I can put a name on it. Label the fear. Give it hands and feet. Give it claws and intentions. But when I do, it only causes me to draw the blankets and move into the center of the bed.

I know it seems silly to be afraid of nothing, but it also seems silly to take the chance.

These waking nightmares have become more common again. My sleeping dreams teaming of people like an amusement park in July. So crowded and hot, so mashed up, it pushes me to the edges of dreaming. So far, the bubble pops, and I find myself awake and listening to the nothingness of the night. Listening to the tide in the trees.

Then the lists: 2 thank you cards, a phone bill, an ER bill, a credit card bill, did the cats go out enough during the day? It was raining, a bag of popcorn, how to defrost bananas, what setting should the crockpot be on when I leave for work? Is it okay to mop the kitchen floor with bleach, or is it too close to leaving for Regionals because there is a strong link between children getting respiratory illnesses and houses that use bleach to clean with, a line from The Book Theif, wait, I am forgetting something important, how many times has the heater kicked on in the last hour, I wonder if the dog opened the back door? Can I really pass turkey chili off as dinner, or are they just going to know that I am totally fucking up and need to go to the grocery store again? Didn't I just go?!?! was that an earthquake or part of a dream?

The night is a lake. It stretches long from one sliver of lit shore to the other. No one really knows what lies beneath it or how deep it goes.

The moon casts white shadows. It pulls at the silky cover, undoing the waves one thin string at a time. It spins a watery dark web in the sky, catching and feasting on stars.

I skip stones of sleep across the night, standing beneath the giant white spider's lair.

The black rings ripple across the darkness. Eventually, they roll out onto the far beach and fade into purring kittens under the light of a rainy morning.

But I start my day slowly because the night is never long enough to throw all the stones it would take to clear the ground at my feet.

now reading: The Poisonwood Bible

a thousand more

I don't know what to write. It's like standing in the outfield not knowing which way to be ready to run. Perhaps that is why I say, play ball, following the National Anthem at Meets. But the question as to whether or not Beach will compete at Regionals is pretty much answered. Although, I doubt anyone but me ever questioned it in the first place. As of right now, she is going.

I personally realized it after a week (or longer) of not being able to do her flick-lay (or even a flick for that matter) she got up on the beam and did a whole routine flick-lay included.

She isn't landing her vault, her bar routine is under 2 weeks old, 

and she has yet to do a floor routine on the actual floor. But she is also Beach. 

Hence, the outfield wondering. This could really be bad. It could be okay. It could even be great. Chances are it will be a mixture of all of those. Most meets are. 

Regionals should be more like a victory lap than anything else. But when injuries get mixed it, it feels like someone moved the finish line back a few extra miles in an already long race.

The biggest "known" possibility is that Regionals will be the last time she competes her current floor routine. She will be getting a new routine for next season. Dance Steps Through The Dim (10/21/17), is the blog post I wrote about her getting this routine: "When she competes this routine for the first time in early December the judges will never know she learned it "blind".  That she learned it mostly from feeling it- listening to the directions under Donna's lead but not always able to see her demonstrations.  Limited too by the small slow healing avulsion fracture in her hip." 

There was no way to know when I wrote that what was ahead.

No way to see how much she was about to accomplish. In her 2nd season competing this routine, 

she has taken 1st on Floor 6 out of 7 meets! All while battling the pain of a compression fracture in her back. 

I try to picture what it will be like this weekend watching her out there competing but I am not great with the unknown. I don't know what she is physically capable of doing right now. I don't know what her body and her heart have in them. 

I don't know her as her coaches and teammates do. I am her mom. I stand back in the outfield trying to catch whatever comes my way. Standing, waiting and squinting into the sun. Loving and hating every moment of it.

My job is to get her there.  

The rest is up to her.