I was cleaning the bedroom blinds today – I don’t think they have been touched in many years, I am ashamed to admit – and Lainey was lying back on the bed working away at an on-line reading exercise. I forget what we were talking about – the difference between memorizing and actually reading, I think – when it occurred to me how much she is going to forget, given her young age.
Already, there are things she asks me about her mother and already she is saying, “Grammie, I don’t remember.” I tell her not to worry; that she will be reminded by all the people who love her and loved her mum, and that here in this house many mementoes await that her mother asked me to bring home.
On the other hand, I am often surprised by what I remember from my fourth year: my uncle offering me a bottle of red cream soda with a straw as I am being taken away from my mother’s home to live with my nutty aunt; my cousin’s arm snapping as she falls from her upside-down position on the monkey bars; my sister throwing the phonebook at me (I wasn’t afraid, either; only conscious of having to dodge in a hurry); eating dill pickles at the kitchen table on Gibson Street; a kind teacher (not my teacher; I was too young to go to school) showing me a soft-looking rabbit in a cage; finding my way home along the river, and my cousin being beaten black and blue by her mother for making a mistake.
Today, after I finished the blinds, I took down the pink glass jar from the window and transferred Don’s ashes into the tea tin. Then, as Lainey made her way from p through t, I went downstairs and poured Sarah’s ashes from their container into the rose-coloured bottle, careful not to spill. I was surprised that the colour of the ashes was darker than Don’s, and coarser, and that a soft-scented mist floated up into the air, momentarily over-taking me.
When I got back upstairs, Lainey was working on the letter z. Z stands for zoo and zebra and zinc. I placed the bottle on the window ledge and finished my work, wondering if one day when Lainey grows up she will have a vignette-like memory of her grandmother cleaning the window blinds, the way I remember my white dress (hand-painted with roses) sent to me by my father when I was so young.
And maybe she’ll say, as she’s retelling the tale, “Yes, my Grammie was cleaning the windows, I am pretty sure of that, and there was a lovely little bottle that she dusted. I think her whole house was quite dusty – she and Gramps always liked old things – and it was summer, and I was learning to read.”
