I fight to remember many things. Not that I am particularly old, not that my mind is falling away, chaffed against time, not those things exactly. It is really about being removed. I fight to remember things that have long passed me. I look out at the passing of time as if I ride in a car, and things blur together in shades of fantastic color. And that's good to recall. The blurry and comforting outline of things.
But this is not it. This kind of complacent remembering. The outlines. The shadows of memories falling across a wall. I fight to remember. Because, if I don't, I fall into the folds, the soft places that connect one day to another, and I forget the strong lines that pull me together.
As I put away towels (the endless drudgery of putting away towels), Amelia comes into the bathroom, looking at something on top of the shelves where I am putting away laundry. "I like that dog," she says, and I have no idea what she is talking about. Then I remember. I look at it, and say to her, putting two neatly folded towels on the shelf underneath it, "That used to be in my grandmother's house."
It is a ceramic hound dog, hollow from the nape of its neck down its spine; it must have been meant to be a planter. And I am suddenly accosted by this dog's former place of residence: on a wooden bookshelf, at my grandmother's, sandwiched in between two chairs. And on the bookshelf, the hound dog was frozen in time sniffing a stack of yearbooks.
Now, as a child, I was fascinated by these yearbooks. My aunts and uncles were enshrined in them. But best of all, so was my father. His yearbook was maroon and embossed with a crest. There were one yearbook that was bound in glittery red; one in silver, I think. I would look through the neat rows of pictures, and there were trends of last names that a lot of the students shared. Because that is common where I grew up; long lines of families reaching back deep into the swells and valleys of the mountains.
The memory of me sitting in a chair by that bookshelf, looking through each yearbook, while the ceramic hollow bellied dog watched me, hits me suddenly and quite vividly. I can hear the adults, just around the corner of the bookshelf, in the dining room (which had a slant to the floor), talking over opaque cups of coffee in mismatched mugs (my grandmother would leave a half cup of coffee sitting in just about every room of the house; having forgot she had one, she would pour herself another). At the dining room table my grandpa made, they talked: my dad, and my mother, my aunts Penny and Pam, and my grandmother, sitting at the head of the table, balancing a cup between her two hands. And she spoke slowly and softly as I flipped through the pages of a yearbook, scanning black and white photos, hoping to see my dad, marveling that he could be a child like me.
Amelia doesn't give the ceramic dog in my bathroom a second thought. I wonder, when she is my age, and is fighting to hold onto her child memories, what she will want to remember most. She never knew my grandmother, but she has been there in that room with the bookshelf. The bookshelf remains there, but nothing much is on it. The dining room, with the slant to the floor, is all but folding in on itself now. My grandparents are gone. The colors of conversation and embraces with them blur at the edges like watercolor. But in the middle, the memories are clear and physical and good.
And I am lucky to be putting up towels and remembering them. No fight at all.
