A Life to Tell Kate

The swamp cooler jammed through a hole in my mother’s silver 1958 Airstream trailer chugged while she decided whether to abort me or keep me. I floated unaware and unseen beneath her expressionless face in a basketball-sized placenta sac, warmed by her heartbeat and a slender feeding tube. It was 1970.

A thousand cicadas beat their tymbals on her front porch, drowning the steady song of cars and trucks passing by thirteen feet away from her front door. Hearing gravel pop under the weight of a slowing car outside and seeing unsettled dust, she pushed herself to an upright sitting position to see more, adjusting the underside of her belly. Despite her doctors urging to eat nutritiously and stop smoking, she couldn’t get used to the growing pressure I placed on her back. She was nineteen and her mother’s blue Granada was pulling into the drive. My mother wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and stood up.

The only thing I can tell you is that I was born on June 27, 1970; six months after my parents married and three months before my father became a Christian. He was eighteen and she was nineteen, and she would follow his Christian example three years later. Just out of high school: he had a good job as a night janitor at the college and she had a dream of becoming a veterinarian. She had been a rodeo barrel rider from age 13, and used her status as rodeo queen to bring attention to neglected animals. He was a skinny, angular, dirty-blond haired idealist looking for safety.