Minute
Memoir
I was born in my
favorite season, Fall, when the earth goes to sleep in a blaze of glory. I have
apples in my blood, a taste for pumpkin, and can see beauty in death.
“Like a plucked
chicken,” my mother likes to say. “You looked like a plucked chicken when they
placed you on my belly.” All nose, all Nancy. Nancy after Frank Sinatra's
daughter Nancy, and the song he made famous, Nancy With The Laughing Face. So many Nancy's born during the fifties,
I wonder if they are all still laughing.
First came the
years I don't remember. The ones known only through photographs—on my mother's
lap at the beach, I am facing her, looking for all those things young ones yearn
for and hope to find.
Then there was
school, the place where everything went wrong. Standing alongside the
blackboard in second grade, we are in our bus lines waiting to go home. My bus is
number Ten and my driver’s name is Tom. I love Tom. He yelled at the boy who
ripped my paper butterfly and then made him move to the front seat, “I’m keepin
an eye on you, Danny” Tom said, but I knew he meant both of us.
We are standing by
the blackboard and I see a piece of chalk on the narrow metal shelf that runs along
the board’s edge. I pick it up, no bigger than the knuckle on my seven-year-old
hand. It’s smooth like a stone. I roll it between my thumb and my forefinger and
then decide to write. In the tiniest of letters the word FUCK appears on the
dark surface beside me. The pride I take in my accomplishment is short-lived,
pulled hard by the elbow, I'm set in a chair facing the wall.
In third grade, kids
get mixed up like a bag of M&Ms, my friend Jophie is now in my class. Again
standing in front of my peers, the teacher is asking me questions, the year is new;
we are getting to know each other. My inquisition done I get to choose who is
next, “Jophie,” I say, so happy to see the friend I play with just a few feet
away. “This is third grade,” I am told. “In third grade we say, Joseph.”
Then there was
life, two brothers, a mom and a dad. I remember going to Carvel and getting Brown Bonnets—soft
serve, vanilla ice cream on a cone, dipped in liquid chocolate that became firm within
seconds. I remember the diner, the one with the stools, silver poles topped with
cream colored cushions, how you could spin and spin while eating salty french
fries dipped in ketchup the color of my mother's lips. I remember my brothers
taking all my stuffed animals, locking themselves in our bathroom, turning on
the bathtub, laughing and making drowning noises while I screamed from the
hallway for them to stop.
Somehow we
survived a loveless home. Despite the
pit-stops of stupidity and self-hatred, I grew. I grew because a part of me remained
secluded like an island, a part that waited and pretended and always believed
in magic. A part that claps to help Tinkerbell ward off the effects of
poison, a part that says thank you to nothing and no one in particular,
but knows that something somewhere needs to be acknowledged for the grace I
have known.
And now living in
this age, the one where I feel one way, but look another, the one where I am
still the girl leaning against a tree deep in the forest behind her home,
notebook in one hand, recorder in the other, penning words while serenading the
woodlands. This is the age when my husband grows dearer to me every second
of every day, our time together no longer holding the endless quality of our
beginning. The age when my children come and go like seasons, tending their own
gardens in their own homes, leaving me behind to roll up a carpet of loss in
their wake. An age in which I relentlessly attempt to make the transition
from daily mom to a perennial one; like the lupine in our fields, I re-root
again and again ready to mother regardless of harsh winters or dismissive words.
This is an age when I am becoming mother to my own mother. More often now her words hide and
her thoughts wander, yet despite this we’re evolving together. Much like the
season of my birth, my mother’s Fall teaches me the world of beauty in death—air
that is crisp, colors that invade the senses, birds that wing overhead creating
slipstreams of memories to warm us during the cold times ahead.
One day there will
be a door to walk through same way I came in, alone, but full of potential. The
spirit of magic that keeps me safe on my island will ferry me from what I know,
to what I wonder. My story will end at a beginning; what this world will be
like without me, and what I will be like without this world.
