Excerpt from
Chapter 1 A Path Around
I walk up the driveway and around the side of the house. An unpruned tree leans over the chain link fence that somehow has been bent downward so the gate to the backyard doesn't work. I push back some big branches to squeeze myself through, trying not to tear my dress. A mosquito bites my bare calf, and I slap it, cursing.
I was supposed to be at a party this afternoon with my husband, Marc, but when I called my mother this morning to wish her a happy eighty-second birthday, I found her landline was disconnected for the fourth time in six months. My sister is out of town, so I have no way to tell my mother that our plans to celebrate her birthday tomorrow have changed except to drive twenty miles over here and leave her a handwritten message.
"Fuck," I blurt out. I slap another mosquito and step over more and more of those lumpy piles of newspapers that obstruct the path and are moldering into cement against the back wall of the house. Where once there was a yard with my mother's carefully planted flowers, now there is a jungle. I loved the pink, red, and yellow roses that separated our yard from the Reese's. It was my job to water those roses in the summer. I used to help weed around juniper shrubs on the little hill by the driveway, spread out in a pretty way so you wouldn't have to mow there.
I take a deep breath. Do I really want to go farther? I don't have another way of communicating with her, so I don't feel like I have much choice. I've come this far today, so there's no point in backing out. I'll confess, I'm curious. What is it like here?
There's an empty, tall, blue recycling bin blocking the back door, and when I move it, I see most of the storm door's glass is gone. I open it and notice the door to the inside has broken glass, too, as though someone has put a fist through it. I flashback to the time my stepfather axed down the front door of the Woodstock Drive house after my mother locked him out. My mother has stuffed this door with yellowing newspaper and heavy, shredded plastic sheets. Mosquitos are starting to swarm out of the bin which is full of stagnant water, and I'm sweating and slapping them away from my face.
I've prepared a birthday card, which I've placed back into its plastic sleeve because it's supposed to rain, and I'm planning to tape it to the back door. My message inside the card is gentle. "Happy Birthday. Your phone is out again. Please call me about the time we are meeting tomorrow.”
What I really wanted to write is, Why the hell did I have to give up my plans and drive all the way here to reach you, and why can't you just pay your phone bill like a normal person, so I don't have to do things like slink around my old house like a criminal? But as a private practice psychologist I know how to use words that don't escalate situations.
Twenty years ago, at a lunch, my mother turned to me and hissed, "I know you've been sneaking around the backyard trying to get in.” I was shocked at the time since nothing could have been further from my mind than going back to this house. It had taken years of my own therapy to be able to leave it behind. Her paranoia was something I learned to tiptoe away from slowly, the way you would avoid a grizzly bear standing up on its hind legs. I'd never been sure when it would chase me down and devour me. I denied I'd been back, and she looked at me with disbelief. She will know I've been here now. And she'll know I've been "snooping" around because the last time my sister left her a note, she’d stuck it on the garage out front.
I keep looking over my shoulder. It's creepy behind the house under the gray sky, even though it's mid-afternoon on a Saturday. "Who lives like this?" I say out loud.
I look at the wrecked door and start to tear up. Something is taking shape in the July humidity—a resolve, a rage, a sadness, a fear I don't fully understand. It's about what might be inside, but also what this house is telling me about my mother. I've seen pictures of houses like this.The dirty, covered windows, the tall weeds blooming all over the yard, the unopened mail—all signs of a life unraveling. I don't know what I should do about the way my mother is living. But it's clear to me that Melissa and I need to do something. My mother raised us. She was the parent who was there.
Lost Found Kept: A Memoir
by Deborah Derrickson Kossmann
Trio House Press
January 5, 2025
Paperback | 284 pages
ISBN: 978-1949487336
Print: $24.99
Winner of Trio House Press's inaugural 2023 Aurora Polaris Creative Nonfiction Award