Hard Old Life, Part ii

One hundred years ago today, my mother entered this life in a tiny hamlet called Adona, a thousand miles from where I now sit. She was the first child born to my grandparents Floyd and Willie Mae, and she never lived more than one hundred miles from the sharecropper’s shack in which she drew her first breath and opened her eyes. To my knowledge, she had exactly one birthday party in her life, an awkward affair hosted by my wife and me at her house in 2001, also attended by her daughter, her son-in-law, and all of her grandchildren. But that is another story for another time.

~ SKO

Dear Mother,

For all your life, you had an appreciation for wood and for objects made from the living fibers of a tree. You knew trees; do you remember how you would point out different varieties when we walked, and especially on the rare times when we were in an unfamiliar locale, always being careful to tell me about the trees above us? Whenever you noticed a piece of furniture or even a cast-off  slab of lumber, you would stroke the grain with your fingertips, and you would say, “Oak, doll.” Or “That’s pine. See the knots?” Or “Oh, cherry, doll. It’s a warm wood.”

And so it has long pleased me that my earliest memory in this life is one of wood and of you, the woman who enjoyed its structure and its beauty.

I am lying on my back on your lap, and you are wearing a blue dress made of what looks like chambray, a house dress with a row of large wooden buttons, as blonde as dollops of butter & syrup, the size of half-dollars. I am delighted by the buttons, and I am reaching my dimpled hands up to try and touch them. I am laughing, or trying to laugh, but my chuckles turn to coughs.

You are smiling down at me, and talking to me in a melodious voice, but you are also talking to someone else in the room. I know — I just know — that this other person is my grandmother, your own mother, whom I will call Nanny all my life. My face is hot and tight, and I feel quite tired. I reach once more for the buttons, and then the soft weight of sleep bears me down and away…

When I was about fourteen or fifteen, I mentioned this memory to you…do you remember the conversation? As it happened, it was Thanksgiving and Nanny stood in the kitchen with you while we talked. I described the memory to you and said, “I must’ve been, what? Five or six at that time? Just starting school?”

You and Nanny exchanged a look, then both of you stared at me. Since at the time, with my build and long hair, I looked quite a bit like a dust mop wearing jeans. I was accustomed to adults staring at me. Finally, you spoke, but not to me.

“I don’t see how he could remember that,” you said to Nanny.

My grandmother continued staring at me, then shook her head. “Unless you talked to him about it.”

You raised your voice just a notch – you never liked to be accused of anything, and you took so many statements as accusations. Perhaps, though, with good cause, especially within our family. “Well, no, I didn’t talk to — why would I do that, and him a youngun?”

Nanny turned back to the stove, frowning through her glasses. I sensed something; I was missing something.

“Why is this a big deal?” I asked. “I only mentioned something I remembered.”

You looked at Nanny, and Nanny looked at me. Your gaze joined your mother’s, settling back on your son.

“What?” I asked.

You shook your head. “You was six months old when that happened. You had a fever. I was holding you on my lap on a pillow, rocking you in the rocking chair. And I was wearing that blue dress with the wood buttons. I got shed of it a long time ago, but I think I saved the buttons.”

“You did,” said Nanny.

I felt the weight of something significant pressing down on me, into me, warming me as the fever had warmed me when I was –what had you said? Six mere months old? I tried to push words out, words to match the pressure inside me.

“I…how…I didn’t –” I stopped and took a breath, then shrugged at the two of you as you continued to stare at me. “I didn’t think anyone could remember that early in their life.”

Nanny turned back to the cooking. I had the impression that she was irritated; it seemed that I irritated her regularly. You looked at her for a moment, then back at me.

“Well, doll, looks like you can.”

And then you returned to the ritual of meal-making, your gaze somewhere else, your hands moving with their artist’s strokes.

Memory and ritual were forever bound up with the two of us, the one announcing the other. Memory and ritual, the twin engines that powered our relationship, that kept structure and safety in my green life, that painted a mask of melancholy and longing on your angular face. Memory and ritual pushed themselves into the soil of my heart when I appeared in this world, and they waited to be watered. In the fullness of time, they were, and did you see this at the time, my mother?

I was born three minutes past midnight in the early days of the year the Irish Republican Army began mixing batches of explosives in Belfast bathtubs, and my first bathtub was the kitchen sink in the cramped rental house on Linden Street. You bathed me, Sunday’s child, in that sink, and you sang me to sleep in my bassinet, a large top drawer from the ancient dresser in your bedroom, a drawer coated in thick lacquer, cracked and bubbled like leather, with tarnished brass loops for drawer pulls. Sometimes I can see your face above me, smiling down as you did that day when I wanted so much to touch the wooden buttons on your blue dress.

~ S.K. Orr