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SUSAN SIGNE MORRISON
April 6, 2020
We were supposed to go to the Hull house. I would take an extra week off after my Texas university’s spring break to coincide with John’s own holiday from his college in Ohio. We’d meet near Boston at the home owned by my husband and his siblings. It lies twenty feet from the water. One day, they joke, it will be in the water.
Ha. Ha.
Not.
Things, however, were starting to look dire. And not just for the Hull house—which some of the sibs were determined to sell before we’d all be sloshing around on the slate floor of the kitchen.
“I don’t know, John,” I FaceTimed. “We might have to cancel. Or postpone until May after classes let out.”
John is a very even-tempered and chillaxed young man. Yet even he can get angry. About:
His sister thinking that the Adriatic was not part of the Mediterranean.
The innocuous 1941 film “Sun Valley Serenade” with Sonja Henie.
The sibs selling the Hull house.
But this story is not about the sibs selling the Hull house. Have I mentioned yet that some of the sibs intend to sell this sacred gathering place? Which has the most perfect view in the world—except perhaps for the friendly drug dealer in the parking lot.
It is about our trip. Delayed. Postponed. Canceled.
Not yet, O Lord.
Rather, we still were at the point when it was possible.
Me: “Let’s check the weather in Hull.”
John: “49 and foggy.”
Me: “51 and light rain.”
The boy and I stare into each other’s eyes via the screen. What????
Me: “How can we have different weathers on our phones?”
John: “Maybe cuz you are on Central Time and I’m on Eastern so you are an hour behind?”
Me: “I don’t think that’s how it works.”
John: “Maybe we are in alternate worlds.”
Me: “We can’t be. We are talking live.”
John: “Are we?”
Me: “Maybe Hull is in two different worlds and we accessing them separately.”
John: “So that means….?”
Me: “I don’t know.”
John: “That we could travel to Hull in the world without the virus.”
Me, slowly: “Ok.”
John: “Couldn’t that work?”
Me: “How can we be sure to stay in that safe world?”
John: “By going there on my phone.”
Me: “Or is mine the safe one? And besides, we can’t get there by phone.”
John: “Let’s try.”
Stories are one attempt to shift into that alternate world. The nontoxic world. The one where all the sibs plan to keep the Hull house. The one where the weather corresponds.
The one where John and I can meet.
Living in Austin, SUSAN SIGNE MORRISON writes on topics lurking in the margins of history, from WWII diaries to excrement in the Middle Ages. Professor of English at Texas State University, she is committed to making visible the lives of women hidden in the shades of history.
