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Grandma Swayne said that when she made my mother, she started with an oblong stone. She found it at the edge of Sideling Hill Creek by Little Orleans—the area of Western Maryland where my grandfather was born.

She took that stone, smoothed by the creek’s ambling waters, and around it wove the flesh of the child who would grow up to be Mother. She did the same with each of her nine children.  Nine smooth stones.

Grandma may have told this story to her grandchildren when they asked questions, perhaps to avoid having to explain the facts of how babies are made. Nevertheless, she was the family storyteller, and this was one of her yarns.

Some people in Western Maryland said that the nine Swayne children were hard-hearted, raised as they were during the Depression, hungry and driven by lack. Especially the six daughters—uncultivated girls who grew into steely women determined to find their way in the world. Beautiful women, all of them, they did things that were whispered about in town. As they married, divorced, and remarried men hoping to find the security they never knew as children, people said, “Those Swayne girls are hard on husbands.”

Some of them were hard on their children, too.

My cousin Debbie, Aunt Armeda’s daughter, once shouted at her mother, “You’re a black-hearted bitch!”

I would never have said such a thing to my mother. But I knew her heart. I felt it, rock hard and invincible, impervious to mercy or regret.

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When I was four years old, in the evenings after he came home from work, my father let me sit on his lap.  He smelled like citrus and spices, sometimes with a metallic hint of sweat. His big hands pressed hard against my thigh as he tightened his arms around me.

I loved to rub Daddy’s chin and feel the scratch of his white and black whiskers on my fingers.  I laid my head against his chest and listened to his heartbeat, the swish-thup, swish-thup that sounded like a bird’s wings in flight, delicate but insistent. 

Hearing his heartbeat made me feel limp and sleepy. Sometimes in bed at night when I turned on my side, I could hear that same sound, the beating of my own heart, in my ear. That’s how I knew I was Daddy’s girl.

The winter after Daddy’s first heart attack, I was eleven. A blizzard hit Western Maryland, and Mother and I shoveled the deep snow from the driveway of our house. Daddy had to stay inside. His doctor had warned him not to shovel snow in his condition.

“Men are fragile,” Mother explained. “It’s up to us women to do the hard work of living.”

I thought of Daddy’s heart as a bird, fragile and fleeting beneath his breastbone. To hear the flutter of its wings like a quick wind, I pressed my ear to his chest.

Cover Photo: Marina Zasorina at Pexels