Wreaths of Love

“Wreaths of Love”

          Ethel swung her glazed stare to the wall with its peeling plaster paint. Here, a tortoise, there a rather large looking bear butt? Or perhaps it was just some Italian’s hairy rump? Faces and geometrical shapes leaped and clawed viciously at her raw and bruised mind, with its overtones of a squished banana. The starkness of the walls was almost made garish by the accidental works mirroring Picasso, or even Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel .But they quite couldn’t, because these artists, with all their vision, could not match the brutality of the shadows and the colors, nor could they surmount the beauty of man's nature, and self-centered views.

         But these thoughts were inconsequential to Ethel, who was celebrating her seventy first birthday in the office of the Squeaky Clean Tissue Company’s Tacoma factory, where she was contented to make five dollars an hour six days out of the week. Her bridge friends would have been proud, had she had any. Ethel lived alone, ate alone, and slept alone. She was the epitome of loneliness, the last grape on a shriveled up vine.

         Now the manager, waddling in with the burden of 20 donuts on his fat ass, said he had a choice word or two for Ethel’s work ethic. His tirade ran along the lines of “such a holdup in the production line” and “you’re just not the young girl you once were”. Ethel was beyond being shocked; she had passed into the realm of oblivious. And all she could stare at were the walls, those museum art quality walls.
Mr. Blah-and-Boring as Ethel liked to call him guided her out the door gently by the elbow. As the steel door slammed shut behind her, the gust of wind caused her to shiver uncontrollably. Her liver spotted skin became a hilly region of goose-bumps. She gave a thought to where she should be going, and if it involved a coat. She didn’t know, nor did she care. She was Ethel; she was nothingness.

         So her vague form shuffled down the littered streets, through a narrow alley complete with starving cats and the complied garbage of humanity that was Wang’s Chinese Roadhouse, over which she lived. The yells of “moo shoo!” and “Wang!” crawled like insects into Ethel’s barely furnished living/bedroom. They crept up into her ears, and filled her brain. But to Ethel, they were the only words of love she got, in her own strange way. They became her voices, her friends.

         “Hello Wang,” she spoke into the great void of air. “How is the kitchen today? Really? Lovely, I’m so overjoyed to hear that Lolo is with child! What’s that you say? Of course I’ll let you get right back to work. Nice speaking to you.”

         And so Ethel’s day went. After her daily imagined conversation with Wang, she’d have a tuna fish sandwich with a sweet pickle and a cup of peppermint tea. Then it was off to bed, with a book and two glasses of water, one for her and the other for her dentures. It was not a bad life by material standards, but it lacked what made people human, love. And so Ethel became pseudo-human, an empty shell carting around a dead spirit.

         Now as most people know when the rent doesn’t get paid, the landlord comes a knocking. This very same event happened to Ethel one bitten and ragged looking morning.

         “Mrs. Brown! Excuse me Mrs. Brown!” the pitiful weasel of a man petulantly cried from the other side of the locked and bolted door.
Ethel swung one spider-veined leg out of the bed, followed it with another, and slipped her feet into worn, ragged slippers shaped like puppies that she had found in the trashcan by Wang’s. Plodding to the door she yawned, and glanced at the wall clock, which read 12:07.

         “Mrs. Brown! Mrs….”

         “Yes,” she replied as the last bolt clicked and the door opened.

         “Mrs. Brown… Ethel, I haven’t received rent from you for two months, I’m not running a charity here lady,” he spit out this last trying to look tough, but turning pink as a babies' bottom in the process.

         “But Mr. Bottoms, I lost my job you see, and…”

         “Lady, I’m not trying to be mean or nothing, but I got to make a living you know?” he could only turn fuchsia with this next remark. “You got ‘til next Friday, then I’m going to have to apply my boot to your posterior, comprende?”

         Spinning on his butt-kicking boots, he sauntered down the hall. But it was a walk you could see through, the kind of walk that wouldn’t even fool a dog. It definitely warranted no respect, and even a bit of pity. In fact his dog, Buster frequently peed on his leg in the evenings when he watched pro-wrestling and wished for a girlfriend, but that was another story.

         Well, what else could she expect? Without Earl to guide her, reality had faded to a lighter shade of pale. Three years a widow and she still hadn’t learned how to take care of everyday business.

         Within the next week Ethel packed her few possessions carefully in three medium sized boxes. One for clothes, all scavenged from the racks of the Goodwill, one for various photos and pictures of a previously full life, and the last for the myriad of odd objects that occupy most seventy-five year old women’s dwellings.
         She was therefore prepared for the event of her eviction, and her almost angelic descent into homelessness. Actually it would have to be classified as house-lessness, because she hadn’t had a home since Earl had died. She wheeled all her goods out into the alley in a guiltily stolen shopping cart, and headed for the nearest road out of town.

         Five days and many miles later Ethel found herself on the outskirts of Wilkeson, a Carhartt and logger filled town. She had been sleeping outside with her handmade quilt, the warm summer weather making life on the oust possible. By now she made quite a picture, hair falling limply like threadbare cloth, and cheeks smudged with dirt like a child making mud pies. She’d run into some hippies along her way, so she now sported a tie-dye t-shirt with a pot leaves on it, though she didn’t know what they were. If the law had seen her, they more likely would have picked her up for insanity than vagrancy by the way she looked.

         To pass the time Ethel begged for food from the passing truckers and hicks, listening to loud Honky-Tonk when someone felt sorry enough to take her to the diner, and making wreaths out of pine needles to thank her patrons, just like her grandma taught her.

         Wreaths of Love her Nana had told her. They were made with patience and love, for it took large quantities of work to gather enough needles, and during the actual manufacture of the wreath, it took much fortitude to stand the sharp poke of the needles constantly piercing the skin like tiny swords. Blood of the maker was borne on the wreath as a testament to their ferocity, tenacity, and determination. Everyone had thanked her for the gift, but not a single one had understood the symbol of sacrifice, not even Earl. Nana had also said, “Child, love is sacrifice, endless, but forgiving.”

         The next morning Ethel awoke the routine was seemingly the same. This time though, a breath of winter stalked down her blanket. She couldn’t completely trust her worn and ragged eyes, but the trees seemed to have a tinge of some color that wasn’t green. The same hippie shirt still adorned the emaciated form, but the leftovers from the diner had run out yesterday.

         It was the story of life and death that plagued Ethel, and at this moment her sun seemed to be setting. She ached from head to toe, and something was drastically wrong with the way she breathed. Winter was coming on alright, but not just in the air and trees, it was coming on in her as well.

         Another trip to the diner seemed to be in order.

         At the diner, Earl Hollister sat with a slouch of contempt, slowly spitting out his Copenhagen into a napkin while the waitress gave him a faint look of disgust, as if he cared. Oh well, not much doing tonight, all the guys would be running home to their wives with their tails between their legs. Suckers, he never could stand the men who had just gone from one nag (momma) to the other (wife). No, he was a man, nothing between his legs but what should be, yes siree. Perhaps he’d go home soon and make his wife rub his feet.

         A crazy crone walked into the diner on that note, and boy did she look a sight! Wacked out ex-hippie he thought, upon seeing her flora-laden shirt.

         “Excuse me,” she asked the waitress at the counter “but do you have anything to spare?”
“No mam, I’m sorry,” she replied, mixed pity and annoyance warring on her face.

         “Ah hell Stella,” Earl said, throwing down a few greenbacks “get her a damn dinner will ya?”

         “No prob Earl,” she replied, with suspicion clouding her eyes.

         “Thank you sir,” the old crone said. “My name’s Ethel, and yours?”

         “Not that it’s really any of your business Ethel, but my name’s Earl.”

         “No! Well you don’t say! My husband’s name was Earl! Say, you don’t like football do you?”

         “Well actually…”


         After she had eaten her meal the woman called Ethel took him outside and gave him some pokey green thing. She called it a “wreath of love”. She said she hoped that it was the best she’d ever make or give, he reminded her so much of her husband, and he was such a good man; which only served Earl to remind him of what a good man he wasn’t. But to be good in another’s eyes, maybe that made one good, even if only a little. She smiled at him and walked off, to whatever hidey-hole she had burrowed into with her gnarled badger-hands.

         That night he didn’t yell at his wife, he even told her he loved her and gave her a kiss before he went to bed. It was strange, this moving virus of goodness. It ravaged him over and over, but he could not stop it. Three days later, when he was burping the baby for the first time in the child’s six months, the 5-o’clock news came on with a story about an old woman….

         “An elderly homeless woman, believed to be Ethel Brown, was found dead last night in the outskirts of Wilkeson. One of the local truckers who knew of her whereabouts went to check in on her last night…”

         Earl couldn’t believe it, that was the same woman who had given him the niceness disease! He stood up and asked his wife to take the tot, while he went and grabbed the messy wreath out of the back of his rusted ’78 green Ford. He took the bedraggled thing inside and showed it to his wife, who exclaimed and made small feminine noises of dismay. But as he stood there with that prickly gift in his hands, he realized what a “wreath of love” was. It was the prickly, sometimes uncomfortable bond that brought a family together, and made them bleed, and love, and die for each other. It was the never-ending circle that meant both life, and death. It meant simply, love. Grabbing the baby once more, Earl was perhaps more scared, and more happy than he had ever been in his entire life.



Thanks for reading, please rate and/or review!