She

Pamela Zimmerman

Winner, Winnie Davis Neely Award in Creative Nonfiction, 2024

She used to have red hair; there was a fire in it that matched the sparks in her brown eyes. She was long and willowy. Someone once said her head was like a flower on a stem.

She used to be pursued. The neighbor boy had an absolute "case" for her, but she, as she eloquently put it in later years, "would have nothing to do with him, and children shouldn't be thinking of those things anyway."

Even in those days, she had little patience for nonsense.

She was full of energy and attitude; she was a slim young thing in her pastel dresses that she'd hemmed just a little shorter than the accepted norm. It was the late 1950s and the sun was shining and she was immune to the social upheaval brewing, the Civil Rights uproar. She didn't listen to Elvis, or know who Marilyn Monroe was.

She fell in love with a tall young man who had dark hair and dark eyes. He would knit his dark eyebrows together when he was thinking, or squinting against the sun. He wore white shirts with white suspenders.

Legend has it that his deep, gravelly voice could be heard a quarter mile away. They say the neighbors heard it when one of his acquaintances almost drowned in front of him.

She had nine children with him. There was always a lot going on, but they divided and conquered. They had a system and their household was the heart of it and they were the heart of the household.

She planted pink roses by their front door. They bloomed generously, and their fragrance drifted over visitors who came by to see the latest baby every two years or so.

She was the woman with the pretty babies.

It was 1977 and he came in from mowing the lawn and lay down on the couch to rest. She never saw him awake again. They said it was an aneurysm of the brain.

It was the last rest anyone in that house got.

She kept the system running alone. Sometimes it felt more like a war than a system. There was no time for rest.

She had to be the heart of the household all by herself. She never married again, never had a lover. The more tired she became, the more she pushed herself. The more she expected from the children.

That energy never ran out.

Movement became her legacy. There was no sitting and thinking. There was only getting things done. The survival of ten souls depended on that.

Her nine dark-eyed children, three redheads like her, six brunettes like him, carried her legacy forward. Almost entirely unwittingly, they carried her mindset with them.

It was 1985 and she clothed and fed them, and taught them to clothe and feed themselves. Sometimes they lived on prayers and sweet onion sandwiches for days at a time. Each child left school after the eighth grade and went to work. There was factory work and there were farm jobs to be had.

Work was always the order of the day.

Throughout the years, she would periodically wonder if her husband's death was divine retribution for something she had done wrong. Maybe they hadn't trusted enough.

Trust came hard for her. She'd rather just get things done herself.

The decades ticked by, after the fashion of leaves floating downstream;  seemingly meandering but always with forward motion. She planted a garden every year, even when her last child, her flame-haired baby girl, had gone off into the wide world.

She grew green beans and tomatoes in 2009, just as she had in 1991, when all of her children were "big kids;" just as she had in 1977, when she was a new widow with toddlers and teenagers running amuck. Just as she had in the 1960s, when she was young and in love, with an answer to everything.

There were fewer rows now, but the things she planted were the same. She still got up in the early morning to do the weeding, when dew lay as a carpet of liquid beads on her yard.

The noise and clamor and urgency of the earlier years had receded. She was no longer poor and she was very comfortably situated. She had roses and strawberries growing in the front lawn of her little white cottage in Ohio.

But one can't just stop a barreling train; and no more could she turn off her habit of constant motion. The momentum was just too great.

In 2017 she got a job at a bakery. She rode a bicycle to work everyday and spent her eight hour shifts making doughnuts, and cream- filled cake bites called gobs. Most of her coworkers were young single girls. She found their high spirits and ready laughter infectious.  They pulled her back to a time that existed now only in her memory and in one faded photograph- a time when she was full of hope and humor,  and wore pastel dresses just a shade shorter than the norm.

Her hair used to be thick and red once; it would flame to life in the sunlight. Now it was thin and the color of the flour she used to mix up delicacies every day. That was as it should be; it suited her status as grandmother and matriarch. The last time she'd gotten a new pair of glasses, she had barely recognized herself in the mirror, what with all the lines on her face thrown into high relief.

But her brown eyes still snapped.

It's 2023 and she is immune to the social upheaval and civil rights uproar. She doesn't know who Taylor Swift is, and she's never seen a Marvel movie. She is self-deprecatory, because that's what she's been taught; but she is not abashed, because she has always been assertive. 

Hers has been a life of action and production, of duty, of constant and pressing responsibilities.  That was what she was given, and she has embraced it. She has been hurt and she has hurt others, but she has taken it in stride, because she's had to.

The apple pies she just took out of the oven are cooling on her front porch, and pink roses bloom below the white railing.

She will keep going.

A storyteller almost since birth, Pamela Zimmerman grew up exploring on a big farm next to Lake Ontario. She's a strong believer in the power of nature as a storytelling aid. It's a scene-setter, it's an atmosphere changer, it's a plot device. She credits this attitude to her mother, who could never get enough of the outdoors, and would take the entire family on long nature hikes.