When I was five I began drawing. Six, writing. Every paper in my tiny bedroom was filled. I sat on my twin bed and poured out my heart to the Raggedy Ann and Andy sheets. Emboldened with their always smiling and gentle approval, I held the paper in my plattered, chubby hands, and presented it to my mother. She knew the gift that it was, and welcomed it with a caring so safe, so loving, that I knew I could do it again and again.
I did it daily. When my mother passed, it was that little girl that looked directly at me, that looks at me every day, hands and heart extended, she asks me where she is to go. And she’s so small. And I don’t want to hurt her. She’s still so filled with ideas and belief, and I can’t turn her away. When she comes to me, with all that raggedy trust, I smile, and do the best that I can with what she is offering. I tell her what she has made, what we have made, is something special, and I clutch it to my beating chest before setting it free.
If you’re reading this, I, we, stand before you, so small, but still believing it matters. And I will do it, again, and again.
Returning home after the first Friday of my first week in the first grade, I vowed I would never go back to Washington Elementary. This was a week full of firsts, and I’m not sure which one put me over the edge — the school lunch lady that made me eat a pickle, the enforced afternoon nap followed by the milk I refused to drink, the pulling of my long blonde hair by my thought to be friend David Holte, or the introduction of time that seemed impossible to follow.
I felt exposed. Unprotected. I waited by the garage doors for my mom to return from work. When I told her that my future plans did not include school, she didn’t dispute it. This was Friday night — we had the whole weekend ahead of us. Two days for a six year old could seem like a lifetime, so I helped her in with the groceries and my new life began.
Saturday morning I jumped into the Chevy Impala, beside my mom, seatbeltless and carefree. We parked outside the Ben Franklin and walked to Herberger’s basement. I ran through the racks like Dynda’s clothesline, while she picked out some new hand towels. She pulled me out from under and said she had an idea. We walked over to the “new for school” items. Windbreakers. I ran my hands along the sleeve. So sleek and shiny. They could repel anything, she told me. Anything? I asked. Any storm to be faced, she said. Like wind? Yes. Water? Yes. David Holte? Of course. Milk? It would run off your sleeve like a raindrop. I smiled. But what about if I get lonesome? This was the best part, she said, and opened the zipper around the neck. The love compartment. Just open it up and pull it around your head. Tie the strings, and I’ll be with you. I put my arms in the navy blue windbreaker. They slid in so easily. They felt cool and fast. I pulled up the white zipper. Tucked my hair in the hood and made a bow, just like I had learned with my bumper tennis shoes. I felt all of the power contained. She handed the clerk some of her hard earned cash. Exchanged for a receipt, the woman asked if I wanted to wear it home. I may never take it off, I thought.
I wore it straight through Sunday evening. I couldn’t wait to show Cindy and Jan. I got up Monday morning, dressed and ready. My lunch was prepared in a brown paper sack, along with a note to my teacher that said I didn’t have to drink the afternoon milk. Fully zipped and tucked in the protective love of navy, I walked to the bus stop. I waved and smiled as my mom drove down the gravel road. The breeze rolled past my waving arms. I knew I could face anything.
I wake this morning, dressed in a love I will never take off.
My mother wasn’t one to swim, but she made sure that I learned. And right along with it she taught me how to take a DIP — how to access the Dream In my Pocket. “You never know when you’re going to need it,” she explained. So before anything ended, we made sure our pockets were filled. Before making a return trip home, a new trip would be planned. After an event, we’d plan our outfits for the next one. And one of the most important, in the last pages of a current book we would add to our “To Be Read” pile.
I finished “Killers of the flower moon” yesterday. Within hours, I went to my TBR. I had purchased these two books about a week ago. I chose Paul Auster’s “The New York Trilogy,” because he had recently passed. I had only planned on getting this one, but on my way to the counter I saw the book, “The Details,” by Kira Josefsson. I had just listened to a podcast about it on my morning walk, so I grabbed that book too. They both waited patiently by my bed.
I was tired last evening. I had taken my actual first dip in our pool. This summer’s dream was officially out of pocket! The water that may have been splashed onto the lawn was replaced with smiles.
Getting ready for bed, I randomly grabbed the top book, “The Details.” I wasn’t even six pages in, when the magic outshined the lamp clipped onto the pages. The character in the book began talking about her love for reading, specifically for her love of the author Paul Auster. My heart giggled. She went on, her favorite book was “The New York Trilogy.” You just can’t make this stuff up!
I’ve always trusted the readers, and the dreamers. My mother gave me that. Perhaps these pockets were filled from heaven. I don’t know, but I slept in the knowledge that I was still surrounded by magic. And I will take a luxurious dip in all of it, every chance I get!!!
It was the most delightful combination of comfort and brand new.
I made a book of photographs for Dominique’s mother. Each visit we would go through the book, again, for the first time. Her short term memory collapsed upon itself within just a few minutes, but the long term — the love of her family — this recognition remained until the end. So we turned, page by page, holding.
Maybe it’s the heart that takes over, when the brain has had enough. The brain that has warned us, urged us. Shot the warning signs again and again. But thankfully the heart seems to win — turning the the brain’s fears of “remember when…” into the heart’s gathering of “aaaah, but remember when…”
They say memory is unreliable. I suppose if you’re using the brain, that’s true. So I write the stories from my heart, where they seem to be holding, strong. Each day turning the page, saying the “I love you’s” again, and for the first time.
I have know idea how they got them in the house. It never occurred to me to think of those things — the logistics of moving an organ, a clock. And just as I assumed this clock that coo-cooed on the hour was called a Grandfather clock because it was his, I thought it was a Grandma organ, because it was hers.
But it must have been fairly spectacular – this finding of an organ mover, a clock mover, to a farm house just outside of Alexandria, Minnesota. And they must have come through the front door – a door we never used, never even considered. And even if they came through this front door, there would have been a stoop to be navigated. A tiny hall before reaching the living room. But as I said, I didn’t think of it, how they got there. But I did count on it, them being there.
And that was the gift, I suppose. It was all an assurance. One I didn’t ask for, or prayed to keep, I just had it. I knew, without a doubt, what would be found in this house. Coats and overalls hanging in the entry. A kitchen table with uneven legs. Candy in the corner cupboard on the lazy-susan. Sugared cereal beneath the silverware drawer beside the kitchen sink, a kitchen sink that was forever filled with dishes. Something on the stove. Publisher’s Clearing house magazines on the dining room table. The hint of pipe tobacco and baked goods. Television on. A ticking clock. The hum of the organ at the ready. And a love, no matter how many doors or windows were left open, would never leave.
So it continues to be spectacular — this never knowing how it all got in — mostly the love. I just remember always having it. I still have it. And what a thing to move! To carry throughout a lifetime! Enough to make a heart ever coo-coo and hum.
We took it on good faith that these were actual words, what Grandma Elsie named her desserts and baked and fried treats. Through the years, I suppose, I brushed them off as perhaps Bohemian. Maybe they came from the “old country,” as some called it. Maybe I’d just been saying it wrong — after all, I was in my pre-teens before I realized that Aunt Mavis was not in fact Aunt Navis as I had been mumbling. In my defense, there were just so many of us, and when the treats were being made, even more gathered around, claiming relations that no more existed than the names we had apparently made up for the passing of said treats.
After moving to France, I had both the time and inclination to bake. I became curious about some of these desserts of our youth. Google seemed just as baffled as I was. I asked a few relatives. All remembered eating, but the names varied, each still ungoogleable.
I hadn’t realized it until I looked at yesterday’s painting for the blog and compared it with today’s image. I have been thinking that I’m painting in the colors of Provence, while it looks exactly like the colors of Hugo’s field next to my childhood home.
Memories are malleable. They appear at our table without knowledge or invite, like a farm neighbor riding the scent of misnamed desserts — welcomed, and finding comfort in the ever changing knowledge of what we call home.
My first sleepover was in a hospital in Saint Cloud, Minnesota. I was only six years old. They wouldn’t let my mom stay in the room with me that night. I was terrified. I was armed only with my Golden Book — The Little China Pig, and my first baby baby doll, so brand new she was yet to be named. The nurse in white cap, white dress, white nylons and shoes entered the room. She wiped the tears of my mom’s goodbye and said, “I’m Malinda, what’s your baby’s name?” Still stunned from the thought of being alone, I repeated the name Malinda. “Just like me!” She beamed. It was as if she placed her smile onto my face, and connected us, brought me to safety. That’s why I remember my first doll’s name, because of kindness.
The scrubs in the French hospital were flowered pink and blue. The language buzzed around me as I lay on the gurney. It’s not lost on my that my grasp of this language is not a lot more than I had in St. Cloud. And my comfort level was about the same. They wheeled her in next to me, this elderly woman — who was not much bigger than I was then. She was scared, and cried out a little when the man who had just blocked my arm was doing the same to her. In my best Malinda I turned and sent my smile to her. I saw it travel across the sterile room and land on her lips. She smiled back. And we both were saved.
I don’t know her name, but I remember her face. I look at my braced hand and feel myself smiling, in my best Malinda.
It takes so little to give each other the “everything is going to be ok.” I, who have been given so much, hope to pass it on to you. Take my “Malinda,” and pass it on.
I was just a handful, a chubby handful of years older than the bunny that I found in the overgrown field next to our green house. I thought it was an ocean, these waves of green. I asked my mom if that was what colored our house. Yes, she said, always willing to fuel my imagination. I didn’t touch it. My grandfather had taught me that. Tell an adult, I heard in my head. I looked up and down the gravel road. Then across. Patsy was there on the stoop. Telephone in hand, stretched and tethered to the kitchen wall and pulled out the screen door. I wasn’t sure if she was an adult, but she rode the late bus, so it seemed ok. I found your bunny, I told her. She shook her head without putting the phone down. I pulled at her jeans. I pointed to the field. She wasn’t feeling my same sense of urgency. This had to be important. And it was all alone. She kept talking. I looked both ways for a traffic that was never there, and crossed back into the grass that reached my waist. Nothing looked the same. It all looked the same. Where was it? I couldn’t find it. Panic rolled from my eyes. I rode the waves.
Why wasn’t it there? It had to be there! I pleaded with my mom to help me find the bunny when she returned home from work. She walked with me for awhile. When it was clear that we weren’t going to find it, l could see it on her face. We never know when angels will come, or how long they are going to stay, she explained. In one swoop she took away my tears and gave me an angel — an angel bunny. It has stayed with me, all these years, through seas of green, over seas of blue, and I am never alone.
I had one of those dreams this morning, the kind so close to the light of day that it stays through breakfast. It was more of a visit really. I was here in France and saw him walking towards me — Bob Jones — a wonderful man, friend and once co-worker of my mother. He was all smiles and arms that reached out. He hugged me and told me everything is ok. She’s ok, he smiled. And I believed him — that’s what you do when angels come.
It was my aunt Karolynn that led me through my first “March Madness.” It’s spring here in France. It won’t snow. We don’t follow basketball. But each year at this time, I am nestled in New Brighton, MN, in front of the television.
Visiting my cousins in this near Minneapolis suburb usually meant playing with my cousins — in the unfinished basement or outside. We only ever used the back door, which opened to both.
But snow was falling as predicted this March, and I had just had surgery on my knee. My mom was working two hours away, so it fell on my aunt Karolynn to pick me up from the hospital. The leg-length plaster cast was not the full weight of it all. I worried about the school I was missing. The mom I was missing. The fact that my new Adidas track suit pants, purchased solely for this reason, ripped upon trying to stretch over my cast. And even though I had spent much time on summer visits to this place, I had never been alone with my aunt. In the wintertime. Immobile. I started to cry in the driveway. I placed my crutches under my already sore arms and began heading on the sidewalk to the back door. No, she said, and pointed to the front door. I was confused. I had never gone in the front door. It opened to the living room — the living room I had never sat in. She plopped me in Uncle Mike’s chair. Covered me with a blanket. Placed a tv tray around my legs. Brought me a bowl of Chicken Noodle soup – Campbell’s, not an off-brand. And she turned on the television. “It’s March Madness,” she said. I agreed before understanding it was the college basketball tournaments. I liked basketball, but mostly I liked when the announcer talked about the “Cinderella” teams — those with barely a chance, who came out shining! That would be me, I thought. I hoped. Half souped, warmed, the snow kept falling outside. But sitting in this front room, cared for, loved, I was indeed Cinderella.
It was only a moment, I suppose, but it has stayed with me. Here in another country. A March filled with its own unique kind of madness circles around me, and I am safe. I will walk out the front door, and know that I am loved.
The music was playing loudly in the studio, Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.” She came to see me paint, my soon to be mother-in-law. Both being brand new, me to this language and she to sharing her son once again, we struggled to find something to say. I was so delightfully surprised when she joined them in the chorus. “Lie-la-lie, Lie-la-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie…” She clapped along. Whirled her hands in a motion to tell me to play it again. I did. Twice. She touched my canvas (the nearest thing to my heart) and smiled. She made a motion like one would asking for the check at a restaurant. I gave her a pencil and paper, and she went back to the house.
I found a note on my desk later. She wrote it in her best English. The words are mine, but I will tell you she welcomed me to this family.
It was only a few years later. We weren’t prepared for things to be brand new again. I suppose one never is. Losing her memory, she needed the special care of assisted living. It was still new enough that she could tell the difference. She knew what was happening. Tears fell like drops of paint down the canvas of her face. I took out my phone and played “The Boxer.” She smiled, not with joy, but enough to say, “the fighter still remains.”
We fill the car with music as we travel from state to state. When Simon and Garfunkel sing this song, I can hear heaven’s clapping “in the clearing.” We head toward the daily brand new.
