A few years ago now I took part in a writing workshop; the focus was on short memoirs, anecdotes, snippets of time.
I recently stumbled across the piece that I wrote that afternoon, which was timely, as my creative writing class at school is currently working on short memoirs and anecdotes.
Though it needs some work, though I haven't touched it since, I am sharing it here, now, with you.
I found it in a box, buried with other books, and photographs, and dust. I was supposed to be cleaning my father’s office, which stored desks, CDs, my mother’s “fancy” outfits – you know the type, for Christmases and weddings and th
e few other yearly events for a farmer’s wife – a computer that finally, finally had the Internet, and, of course, storage boxes. I was supposed to be cleaning and staying off the “damned computer” and its tattle-tale dial-up Internet. What I was actually doing was sitting cross-legged on the blue carpeted floor, rooting through the old boxes.
To be fair, my intentions were innocent. Unlike the re
st of my family, who made fun of my endless lists and colour-coded and alphabetized systems, I really did not like disorganization. The CDs in this room, for example, were backwards and forwards, scattered across the side-table pushed up against the far wall. Some discs were missing, some in the wrong case. My CDs, in comparison, were organized by genre and then alphabetized within that genre by artist. They were in identical, labeled boxes on a dusted shelf.
So I actually was organizing. At least, at first.
I was cleaning out the boxes, grouping photos together, and, of course, getting distracted. There were old cassette tapes, notes, slips of unidentifiable paper, paperback books, but the pictures were what interested me the most.
Old pictures, that had never found homes in album
s or frames, categorized only by names scrawled on the back. I recognized some of the handwriting, some of the names, but not many. The ink on the backs of the photos was slightly faded, the styles and big hair telling stories of times before my own. Photos of bottle-fed calves, cousins, board game nights, former hired men, my mother scowling with her foster brothers, my father on a baseball team, posed in front of the church where my parents were married. Birthday parties, my younger brother and I in handmade outfits sitting beside great aunts and great uncles wearing party hats. And there, amidst all of that, was the book. Small and hardcover, I assumed it was one of mine, that at one point my mother may have rocked me to sleep while reading this very book, one of my grandmother’s crocheted blankets across her lap.
It wasn’t mine.
I do not remember the title, but I know that it was
not what made me turn the cover. It was nostalgia, the same feeling that fueled me flipping through the photos in the first place. That nostalgia, of the little boy and girl on the cover, with big eyes; “little kid” clothes, in which her ruffled little dress showed off bloomers and his overalls were blue.
I flipped through the book, and my mother’s handwriting, in fine, faded ink, identical to that on the backs of the photos, jumped out at me.
Blinking, I returned to the front hard, cardboard page, and flipped more slowly past each one. Under each little drawing, under each typed sen
tence on each page, my mother had written a note. To my father. Before they were married.
Under each image, my mom had written down why she, at about sixteen-years-old, loved my father. One page said something like, “I love that you make me try new things,” and the image showed the girl holding out some broccoli to the little boy. My mom had scrawled under, “Like when you took me skiing all weekend.”
My father is the sentimental one. When I would as
k my mother about meeting, dating and marrying my father, or the boyfriends and crushes that surely came before, she would tell me that it was a long time ago, that it didn’t matter, that it was none of my business. My dad was the one who would reach across to hold my mom’s hand, the one who would tell stories about their lives before us, the one who sat on the edge of my bed reading to me when I suffered my first teenage heartbreak. I would have expected my dad to write these not
es.
I was shocked. I was aghast. I was impressed. I was hurt. Romantic me, who drank up love songs like an elixir, who sobbed during classic novels no matter how many times I’d flipped those pages before, did not know my own mother’s love story. That love story, which resulted in decades of marriage and four children, including me, I did not know. And to my twelve-year-old brain, which had recently cried its very first tears over a broken heart, it felt like a slap across the face.
I wanted to confront my mother with the book. It seemed the appropriate thing to do. This is a part of you? I could say. Why didn’t you tell me? All those times I asked? I wanted you to tell me.
I needed you to tell me.
But I didn’t confront my mother. I didn’t even ask about it. I dusted the cover and placed it on a nearby bookshelf, by the “growing up” photo albums I’d just finished sorting and labeling. It bothered me a bit that the book was really the wrong size to be on that shelf, but something I couldn’t name clutched at my heart when I thought of returning it to the box to be again forgotten.
Days later, though, when I couldn’t shake the image of the book, of my mother’s tight loops and curves on each page, when I found myself for the fourth or fifth time revisiting the bookshelf, pulling out the book a little just to see the cover, I finally asked my father about it.
When I did, there was his familiar grin, which I see every time I look in the mirror. He knew exactly what I was talking about as soon as I began. He filled in the blanks for me, the backstory I’d accepted I’d never hear.
That book, he said, was what he took with him for hours on the tractor. He said he carried it with him while his combine ran from before dawn till well after dusk, circling the field again and again as he counted the moments before he got to see my mom again. In fact, it was that book that my dad returned to, as he decided to ask my mother to marry him.
That book was a window to that world, my mom’s world, into which I have never before been allowed to peer. The world before she was a mom, when she was only a little older than I was at that time. Before she had a closet of clothes she only wore once or twice a year, before she worried about having a meal on the table on time for a crew of men working the fields, before I existed, when she had a different name. A different life.
And though I do not know where that book is now, probably shoved back in a box amongst the old pictures, my careful organization years s
ince ignored, I did learn the story:
Once upon a time my mother was a teenager. She wrote in a child’s picture book and gave it to my father. He carried it with him and decided to ask my mother to marry him. I was born, and my siblings. And though I didn’t see her grin in the mirror, and though she never did answer my questions, years later, I understood that ma
ybe, just maybe, I was not so different from the woman who first sent me to clean that old office after all.