Handkerchief memories and adobe kisses

I have been called upon lately to help with many little things. There have been no life-threatening situations. In fact, there has been a lot of pleasantness. But with each day comes a new chink in the armor, a gentle crumbling at the edges of our old reality. 

Sometimes, it comes in the form of an off-hand comment from my dad or mom. Sometimes I just notice that I’m comfortable with something ugly that didn’t exist even as a possibility in my mind at this time last year: ER visits, changing bandages, talking about futures that were once more certain.

I’m fine. Really. But I just wanted to acknowledge that that’s what’s happening. Little pieces are falling away. A new reality emerges.

One of my favorite books is Walk Two Moons, by Sharon Creech. It’s a middle school level book, a Newbery Medal winner, about missing moms.  It’s written as a story within a story and lo and behold there’s another story too. Each time I read it, I learn something new: about writing, about reading, about me. The story is about illness and fear, adapting and growing, appreciating. It’s sad but quite funny.

One of my favorite parts is in the chapter entitled Blackberry Kiss. The main character, dark-haired bug-loving Salamanca Tree Hiddle, is keeping a free write mini-journal at the behest of her new English teacher. First she writes a list of all the things that she likes. Here’s how that turned out: “It was a complete jumble of things, and when I tried to write about any one of those things, I ended up writing about my mother, because everything was connected to her.”

I understand.

In the end, Sal wrote about spying on her mother. Her mother was very pregnant at the time, and was walking through the fields, swinging her arms and singing. Salamanca watched as her mom plucked a few blackberries from a stray bush, and popped them into her mouth. Then her mom walked up to a maple tree, threw her arms around it, and kissed the trunk.

Salamanca later examined the tree and thought she found the stain from her mother’s blackberry kiss. In her journal she confessed that since then she has kissed many trees and “each family of trees – oaks, maples, elms, birches – had a special flavor all its own.”  Mixed in with each taste was the taste of blackberries.  Of course I interpret this to mean that she was searching for her mother, who loved trees,  and found her, metaphorically, in the blackberry taste.  I was an English major. I love pulling books apart in search of deeper meaning. 

    

Though I hadn’t read the book in more than two years, that chapter wouldn’t leave my brain the whole time I was in New Mexico. 

Here’s my interpretation of Sal’s tree-kissing journal entry.

What I like: gray green sage brush, smooth mountains, orange dirt, thick walls, rounded edges, striving art, incense.

What I remember: braided hair, patent leather shoes, Sunday dresses; my mother's pink lipstick, the sting of her White Rain, a pillbox hat, or handkerchief or bit of netting.

What I did in New Mexico: searched the eyes of contorted Christs, kissed adobe, listened for heartbeats.