Sewing Together Salvage
Some of the most important events of my life may not seem pivotal to anyone but me. My birth was of note of course, most births are. A middle child, born in the fall on a day my mother knew would be good because of the red maple leaves she could see out of her hospital room window between the contractions that brought me to her. My sister was born when I was four and a half. I don’t remember her entrance into the world at all, but I do remember breaking my arm hours after they came home. I carried the look of my mother’s frustration as a hallmark of her disdain for me well into adulthood never understanding the events preceding it. My first adult library card at the age of 11, I’d simply read all the books worth reading in the children’s section by then. I clearly remember walking down the spiral staircase and moving between the tall stacks of books hand in hand with the librarian and picking out Swiss Family Robinson, unabridged, a glorious day. Of course, there are a hundred things I have tucked away into hidden pockets, another hundred I wish I couldn’t remember, and a handful of things I’ll hold on to forever.
Moments appear sometimes, like the last time my family of origin was together. We were pretending that my parent’s bed was magic, we’d probably just watched Bedknobs and Broomsticks. It was a Sunday morning, lazy and slow. We must have all piled into their room early. My sister Gabrielle and I manned each corner, Brigid was too little, she must have been snuggled in between us all. I remember the laughter, the way the sunlight drifted in above us, the comfort that existed between us all. We each told a story about the corner of the world we would be visiting, what adventures would await us in these far off lands.
Memories are funny things. Some of them shift and tilt, like looking at the past through a kaleidoscope. Others are tangible and solid, but the stories they tell us are incomplete. Many of mine are fragments, flotsam washing up to shore, bits and pieces of things I don’t always understand intellectually, harbingers of a shipwreck sunk so deeply within I can’t fathom the entirety of what’s been capsized. There are scenes that come to me unbidden, flashes of a picture that don’t make sense, like a slip of consciousness that splits a seam in the universe in two. It’s unsettling, but almost welcome. Burying memories is a way that many of us protect ourselves, our minds work to help us survive unbearable events whose full existence in our psyche might just tear us apart.
Being able to remember shows me I’m strong enough to survive a storm, capable enough to sew together salvage, ready to move between time and space, and brave enough to explore my own hidden depths. “She’s come undone, unhinged, unraveled” … yes, but only so she can put herself back together.
