This quote from Toni Morrison keeps dancing around in my head this morning: “Water has a perfect memory and it is forever trying to get back where it was. Writers are like that, remembering where we were . . .”
The waters in my life run back to the home place, the place I sold a couple of years ago. I still feel an acute sense of loss in its absence—even as I’ve visited and found the new owners repairing and upgrading what I couldn’t.
I understand why my sister was furious with me. All I have to do is close my eyes and I’m back there decades ago. Daddy’s still alive. So are Grandma and Mom. Jo Ann and I would ride our bikes up that devastatingly tall hill, listening to wind humming in the fence wires. Heat would rise from the hard-packed roadbed in waves you could sometimes see. We’d stand on the pedals, inhaling a thin aroma of dust, probably using up all the calories we were about to consume. We’d tramp, hot and sweaty, across Grandma’s entry porch into the kitchen and open the ‘fridge off to the right inside the door. We’d make sandwiches—two slices of white bread, a slice of bologna, a slice of American cheese, a slice of tomato fresh from the garden, and maybe some cucumber slices, all cemented together with Miracle Whip™. We’d never ask.
In the cool interior of that house, we found Grandma and our Aunt Nina. They always seemed glad to see us—even when I stormed in the back door and pounded on the piano before I even said hello. Grandma said she knew then that I’d had a fight with my mother, so she let me pound it out. I find myself doing the same when my one-year-old grandson has his kicking, screaming, arm flapping melt-downs. (He’s usually mad at me.) I lay him on the floor where he can’t hurt himself and let him sort himself out, it usually only takes a few minutes.
