Marrow Read Free Page A

people’s homes all over the country. Her writing took the form of journals, hilarious letters and e-mails, illustrated children’s books, and a memoir she dreamed of writing called Lower Road . She said there were enough things written about taking the higher road; she wanted to write about taking the lower road and finding higher ground the hard way. There was a long dirt road in her area with the actual name of Lower Road—a single lane that hugged a mountain and led into a hollow flanked on one side by marshes and ponds and on the other side by rusty trailers and old farmhouses. When she was a young visiting nurse, her work for the state of Vermont often took her to Lower Road. The book Lower Road was to be a chronicle of her relationship with her patients who lived there: the teenage mothers, the veterans with PTSD, the addicted, the abusive, the abused. The forgotten rural poor whom she cared for with a no-bullshit form of tenderness.
    When Maggie’s computer became her journal, she began e-mailing me entries: excerpts from the always changing Lower Road , field notes from the clinic she ran, funny stories about people she met at craft shows, joyful rants about her new home, about the wildness of the woods in springtime and the sweetness of the sugarhouse on dark cold nights when the maple sap ran. And when she got sick, her field notes came from the loneliness of her hospital bed and the window seat in her home. She wrote quickly, in run-on sentences, making up words, switching tenses all over the place. She never used capital letters and she bent grammar rules. She wrote like a hummingbird would write if it stayed still long enough to gather its thoughts and put them into words.
    I had always planned to help Maggie craft a book out of her hummingbird words. She wanted me to, and that’s why she sent me a whole mess of disorganized computer files. We began working on them when she was recovering from the transplant. But when her energy waned, I asked her how she would feel if I included some of her field notes in the book I was writing. I had been showing her early segments of my book, and she had a wistful appreciation for it—a sense of humor and also grief that she would not be around to see how it ended. Together we decided to include some of her words in my book, and so I scattered them throughout—a trail of Maggie’s truth crisscrossing mine.

PHONE BOMBS
    WHEN I WAS A KID, telephones were stationary objects. Most houses had one, or at the most two of them—one bolted onto the kitchen wall and the other on a bedside table, rarely used. When I became a teenager, my friends got phones in their rooms. Princess phones, they were called, usually pink, with push buttons instead of a dial, and a long cord so you could walk around or lie in bed and chat under the covers. The princess phone never made an appearance in my family’s home. My sisters and I were barely allowed to talk on the phone at all. Why would we need one of our own?
    Phones became omnipresent later on. First, cordless phones made their debut, and then of course came the cell phone. The cell phone changed everything. But before there were cell phones, what changed my relationship with the telephone was becoming a parent. Having children turned a benign object—the phone—into a time bomb. When it rang, I worried, and often my worst-case scenarios came true: a failed test, a bloody nose, a broken arm. One of my sons got suspended from middle school for giving away answers to an exam. During high school, another son was pulled over for speeding and the cop discovered pot in his pocket. I remember where I was when those calls came in.
    Things I never thought would happen also traveled through the airwaves and into the phone like little bombs. Ring! My father died. Ring! Colleague quit. Ring, ring! Trade Towers blown to bits. Andthen there was the phone bomb from my sister at the wedding in Montana. On that day