Minute Memoir

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.