The detritus of memory

Lately I’ve been writing this story in my head from the days before I became a writer, always reminding myself to remember, remember. Whether it was the way the fog rolled in over the mountain, with its chill breath, or the litany of things I saw during the day. Wild animals carried the highest tally, or something my grandmother showed me: how to build a Saint Bridget Cross from the tule rushes that grew in hedgehog clumps following the water table in the upper garden.

I’ve been writing this since I first began to wander afield, collecting an inventory of plants I had no names for, leaving off from where my grandmother, no longer able to accompany me on our early morning walks, no longer instructed. For example, the names of plants. I had to wait an entire lifetime to label and categorize them. All of those jigsaw puzzles of memory became placeholders, waiting for identification, for what knowledge I did not yet have a place for in my head. My eyes remembered those nameless plants, I tucked them away in my mind, a treasure chest to unpack at the end of a long life.

I’ve been waiting for the circle to find its beginning and end, the Ouroboros of memory and history jockeying for position during those liminal moments where you’re neither neither awake nor asleep, where dreams and reality merge like mist, and you can’t tell where one memory or dream left off and another one began.

I’ve been waiting all this time to live my real life, though I’ve been living it all along, but it always felt like it was on hold, waiting for the right moment. What right moment? Maybe it was because I was afraid of change and caution was my handicap, I was always keeping things in obliettes because nothing is ever guaranteed, other than life nor death—other than the struggle between the here and now and the there and then.

Lately I’ve been sharing the stories of the past with new old friends, thinking surely that wasn’t me I was describing a lifetime ago. The inside and outside worlds colliding, head on, and I wonder about all those dropped stitches constantly unraveling the tapestry of our lives, those dropped threads leading us in other directions.

Lately I’ve been gathering in the narration of a life hidden in the dungeon of memory, wondering why I am still here. It seems like there is little to look forward to, but then I realize it’s a habit I’ve dragged with me from the earliest days. The if not now, then when, the what if motif of regret. But there is always the now.

Lately I’ve been collecting the detritus on the shores of darkness, finding odd solace there. The creatures I see become unnamed talismans: a lizard, a young gophersnake or the tree swallows seeking the eaves of my grandmother‘s house. The vents were closed off a half century ago, but home is genetically imprinted in their memory banks, and though untold generations have come and gone, they still swoop and practice landing, banking upward only to be met by steel mesh. I remember the day their babies fell out of the nest and we found a tall ladder to return them to the eaves and the inconsolable parents, swooping and crying.

I am lost and have no ending for this piece. The mosquitoes have been drilling into my forehead, reminding me of the fallout of a wet winter.  I can’t stop thinking about pipevines, for example, the only source of food for the pupae of the rare black swallowtail. How slender the thread of life is. Or the return of the bluebirds after a half-century of absence. The partial reversal of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Near extinction is always at hand.

Lately I’ve been letting go, perhaps returning to the void where we no longer matter. As I face the deep grass of the upper field that must be cut before the arrival of summer, is a race against time because after a long wet winter, the grass is still too wet to cut. And when I when I was young, weed-eaters didn’t exist, so I used a scythe—that father time image—and that zing and waltz of felled grass became an ingrained song of the field..

Lately I’ve been remembering about all the almost lovers I was too afraid to let in, let alone, to let out. I mourn for my amethyst earring gone missing—something I’ve had since I was a teenager, whoever finds it will not know the stories it carried from Inverness. Or the ring of Italian gold, the band so thin after a lifetime of wearing it, like a shaft of sunlight, the chip out of the stone reminds me of a playful kick meant for my rear from Neil as we walked about around above Lake Merritt. I should have left him then, but I waited 20 years to make a move. I wear it to remember, and the pungent odor of wcut grass brings it all back home.

6/6/24 Write On! with Susie Terence