Remembering
The miracle of being able to do that
Journal: 8 December, 2024, morning.
My Mom loved broccoli cheese soup, and eggplant casserole (her recipe, which I cannot find), and Chanel style suits, and white cloth Keds, which she would wash with bleach to keep white. My sister loved strawberry pie, made with fresh strawberries in that luscious glazed filling, and strong coffee (although she never made it that way), and her birthstone ring that my brother-in-law gave her a lifetime ago, and working in her yard. Both of them tried for years to paint clouds and never did that to their own satisfaction, and my Mom tried to paint her childhood home many times. My Dad loved cane ribbon syrup with hot biscuits and butter, and four-part harmony, and fiddle music, and the Dean Martin show, and was incredibly patient with me when he enlisted my help during truck repairs (now push the brake pedal in).
I’m thinking this morning about what we remember and what we forget, and that there will be a last time for all of those memories, the last time we think of a particular thing connected to the people we loved beyond all reason.
It happens. It will happen. And I wish I’d written down these things, wish I had a tangible reminder of my grandmothers and childhood and all the things that are no more. I wish I could pass these things on to my children, so there’d be at least one more generation that remembered.
Well. It’s not too late to do that, I know. Lots of people write family histories, although ours was an oral tradition. My Dad’s stories, for example. He had hundreds. Some I remember, most I don’t.
Why do we think we’ll always be here, that there’ll always be enough time? Maybe to remain reasonably sane we must live in that mode, otherwise we simply couldn’t function, consumed with thinking only of our ephemerality. Practicality, so that we can just get on with the business of living. Necessity.
On these early mornings though, sitting here in this quiet and sleeping house, I remember. Back through the many years, back to my childhood, to my younger self days, to the times that formed and shaped me. I remember. What a miracle of existence, that we are capable of that, isn’t it?
#journalingalife