The Blue Elephant

The Blue Elephant

I scraped up another thick layer of what looked like cat feces with the paint scraper I’d found in the top kitchen drawer—could’ve been dog crap, though.

I had gloves, an N95 mask, a headband already wet from forehead sweat, and Pine-Sol-soaked rags lying about on the worst areas of the floor. Pine-Sol, my least favorite cleaner, remained the only brand stocked in the small desert town.

Its noxious scent barely covered the cat pee smell of the six feral cats that had made my mom’s home their home. The cat boxes had become so full that they were gross, unused room ornaments by the time I arrived.

Yes, my mom had been the neighborhood cat lady. Not much of a neighborhood, just wide stretches of nothing, with no one in sight for miles. They were all gone now: my parents, the six cats, and the dog. Now, the place sat with spinning dust moats and knots of abandoned cat hair caught in the creases of the floor made purely of particleboard. The real floor never happened, nor did the real house my parents had dreamed of building.

Dad passed after completing only this structure, meant to serve as a garage or workshop. It was crafted from rows of stacked earthbags, with keystone arches and sturdy buttresses embracing it.

The outside walls were smeared with mud, clay, and straw. Inside, the bags remained exposed, never finished. He had used the last of their money to build it. This came after the 2008 housing market crash in the United States and a bout of cancer for each of them, bringing them to their knees in poverty.

Later, when a real home slipped out of reach, they squeezed in a bedroom, carved out a bathroom corner, and made do with a kitchen/living room in the remaining sliver of space. The result looked and felt painfully rustic, almost third world.

“Fifteen years of living here,” I hissed as I scraped, “and you never did one damn thing to make this a home.”

(Mom had once said if she did, Dad would never build her a real home.) But he couldn't—not with his health. Any fool could have seen that… but they wouldn't listen to us, their children. Despite their age and finances, they thought this grand adventure would be great.

“Who does this?” I shouted at the empty room. “Who comes to the devil's armpit to live out their old age, with medical help two hours away and barely any money? Who chooses to live in this daily heat, these freezing nights?”

But I knew. So began the new America. Most of us were living on the edge, one too many paychecks lost, too many medical bills, and a fall out of society would begin. That's what happened to my parents. That danger still wavers in my own future.

In her diary, my mom wrote of running out of money seven days before her next Social Security check. It broke my heart. She never told us. I paid her phone bill, sent her care packages, and bought her things, but she valued being frugal with everything, including her secrets.

The floor beat me that day. I stopped when sweat rolled into my eyes and the sting became too much. I felt overwhelmed by the tasks ahead of me and the emotions swirling inside me. Everywhere I looked, too much begged to be done.

To get water, I had to run a generator on the far side of the building. I hated the generator. I always spilled the gas and had to wear a mask and gloves because of my health conditions. I filtered the water through a Britta pitcher before using it for food or drink; never trusting their water well, even though they had drunk it for years seemingly without ill effects.

My third son had cared for them and lived nearby. Each summer, I came to watch over both homes and my parents while he went to Alaska to fish for his year's wages. He had given up his life to care for my parents. No matter that we had all offered them better lives, they refused. My son said he had made a promise to them that they could die here on his property, and that became that.

Everything inside lay buried beneath dust and dirt. Some of the old earth bags had split open, slowly dribbling the dirt out. I mentally planned to patch them with fabric and glue. I even figured out how to fix the base where the cats had clawed it open. I cut pieces of soda bottles sideways, jamming them into each tear, and sealed them. That had become my strength: finding fixes, creating solutions to concrete things, not figuring out the pain and sorrow of my Mom’s life, the why she chose to live this way after Dad had died.

Periodically, I found my eyes leaking tears.

Everyone worried I'd break down here, alone with all this work. But I didn't break, I burned with anger. Who feels that much rage when a parent dies? I should have felt sorrow. Maybe it would come later. For now, I only felt the need to say what I never could while she breathed.

I had walked to the bathroom area, pointing to no one in particular, and said in the most sarcastic voice, one that curled the hairs on the back of my neck for sounding just like my mother,

“Look, look,” I spit out. “See, you could have been sitting here in style!” I swished back the now clean curtain that served as a bathroom door. “Imagine a clean, painted, decorated bathroom and even a rug for your feet!” I pointed at it, my chest heaving.

She would’ve undone every fix I made; defiance ran in her bones.

Her absence echoed loud in my mind. I felt strangely grateful we had never chosen sides on heaven or hell; we were unsure where she might have landed anyway.

I sat on the bed and lay back, hand on the old metal pole beside it. We had joked it would be her dancer’s pole, but it had been for Dad. After his stroke, he needed it to rise and pull himself from the bed. It did not escape me that at my age, I needed it too, my hand rubbing the same places that theirs had.

The unfinished ceiling stretched above me, clad in some kind of industrial silver material. I wondered how she had managed each day here. it. She had lived here in the heat, the dirt, and the isolation. How had she not fled? Her generation lived full of grit, determination, and the belief that they could do anything except let people help them.

The shrews and mice lived in the ceiling and might have reminded her she wasn't alone if she could have heard them. But she had lost that ability. They skittered above me now. The cat's pee probably masked their death scent when I found their bodies inside of things they couldn't crawl out of. She had claimed not to smell them.

She wouldn't let people help, oftentimes taking swings at anyone with her cane if they dared to empty a cat box or move something to a better, safer place. She declared she could do it all.

I had a week to clean this place up, not nearly enough time. Three boxes sat in the main room for her things: thrift store, dump, and keep. She had begun getting rid of things, as if sensing her time ran short. She burned what she could in the burn barrel outside until we finally took away the matches, after she singed her eyebrows. It felt like she wanted to erase every trace of her existence. Everything left had to be sorted, washed, and stored in tubs that rodents couldn't get into. The countertops had to be wiped down every morning after the rodents' nocturnal escapades during the night. Without the cats, they had moved in. I kept my food and snacks sealed inside a refrigerator that didn't work anymore, so I wouldn't have to share them.

Why had she chosen this life? We had offered her so much more than this. Did she stay because they had spent their final years together here, clinging to the life they had built? Were the three of us, her children, that terrible to live with?

When I stripped the bed, the old pillows flopped out, aged, sweat-stained, and sad-looking, with the sweat and tears of my parents. Both had found reasons to cry. Dad's pillow sat there, easy to spot from his sweat. My eyes trailed over its mosaic of rings; I could not sleep with his. The loss of his dreams spilled out like ash. All his hard work and his life ended here, with his twisted, useless hand and arm, crying from not being able to swallow water or talk. Each night, he lay his head down here, trapped in his own body.

Mom's pillow lay flat, defeated, and surely tear-stained. “Don't feel sorry for me,” she once whispered. “I should have left him years ago, but I didn't. I had you and your brothers—I didn’t know what to do. I had made my bed,” she had finished. That pillow, I understood.

At night, despite my attempts to clean it, I lay in a bed that still smelled like cat and dog, and I listened to the desert critters scamper overhead until sleep found me.

I was washing the bedding yet again, without a clothes dryer, hanging the sheets and blankets outside turned into an event. It took a ridiculous number of clothespins to anchor them to the line. The wind in this desert blew everything sideways, and I hoped it would take the lingering dog and cat hair with it.

One day, I opened the small closet that they had built from a Home Depot kit and saw the plastic boxes from the Funeral Home. Each contained my parents' ashes, clearly labeled with their names and dates like miniature graves.

“Well, Dad,” I said out loud to the empty room. “Here stands the daughter you never wanted, never good enough—yet I’m the one cleaning up all your shit.”

“And Mom, maybe you couldn't love me the way I needed it. Maybe you just relished being mean. But here I am, because I cared…. I love you both.”

It had been just me; my brothers had not wanted to help.

Then I cried ugly, loud tears. Sobs that wracked my very soul. Mom always seemed to see me as an opponent. I always had to shield up and wear sparring gloves to be in the same room with her. She seemed to delight in little verbal cruelties towards me, just me, not my brothers; they were the valued ones.

I felt so disappointed. It never seemed to matter what I did. I had chased after her my whole life, always doing, always trying to be so very good and so very helpful for whatever crumbs of love she might have been able to give me; thinking—she would surely love me then. There was no help in gaining my dad's love, as I wasn't born a boy.

I had begun to read her diary each night, and on one page, her words poured a realization into me! She couldn't give me what she had never gotten for herself. Her mother had never been able to love her, valuing her sister, the sister who had died. What I read of my mother's childhood shocked me; it made me realize she turned out a miracle, given what she had endured. She never experienced the joy of love in her own life, so how would she know how to give it?

At sunset, I sat beside the pond my son had built on his desert property. Swallows dipped and dived in the fading light. Sagebrush stretched endlessly to the flat-topped mountains that ringed this whole valley. The sky blushed with streaks of pink, orange, and blue, stretching across the desert and reflecting in the pond.

The beauty here tugged at the heart, a peace lingered; perhaps that made her stay.

While cleaning the kitchen one day, I saw it—the Blue Elephant.

In summer school, I made a childish lump of ceramic with big cartoon eyes and a curling trunk—an elephant created to be a kitchen sponge holder. Fifty years ago, I quietly left it by her sink. I was never brave enough to ask if she liked it, and she never remarked on it, but had quietly put it on the kitchen windowsill. Years later, it had been forgotten.

But here it sat, solid on the grimy shelf.

This misshapen thing had reached all the way here to this barren, dust-choked building! She had thought to bring this out of all their life’s possessions. She had kept it all these years.

I stared, stunned. When? Why? She had always said she loved me, but couldn’t seem to show it, which had pained me. I took on the role of the practical child—the one who kept trying to empty the cat boxes despite her “cane swings” and made sure she had food in her cupboards. She always wanted me to be different somehow, but I could never figure out “that particular how”—and it needled her.

It seemed so impossible! Given all the belongings they had acquired throughout their lives, there had been a limit on what she could bring here. Most of it had gone into storage, which also had to be emptied. But here it sat, the blue elephant, my gift, which I had worked so hard on and wanted her to love.

I continued to stare, mesmerized, and picked it up to the palm of my hand. Who does this? Who keeps something like this for over fifty years?

What mother saves childish lumps of clay art that their child made years and years ago?

I stood rooted, my thoughts spinning as my mind leapt to the tub beneath my own bed. There, treasured were the lumps of clay figurines from my children, carefully wrapped in newspaper. They had eagerly placed them into my hands with wide grins and expectant eyes. Even though I'd moved a dozen times, I had never discarded them and never would.

I hope—oh, I hope that one day, when my children find them, while boxing up the detritus of my own life, they will feel what I did in that moment. Perhaps then, they will surely know that if I hadn’t ever said it loud enough, fairly enough, and if I didn’t mother each of them well enough, perhaps my saving those figurines will show them—I loved them as hard and as deeply as a mother can.

Just as my mother had….