history

Familiar Limbs

Memories are strange beasts. Separating them from the human existence creates another condition – those who cannot remember. Dementia and Alzheimer are destructive diseases, and their impact is felt throughout a community, even more on the individual families who go through it. However, it is the sense of loss of the person themselves due to their own lack of awareness which can be even more painful to live through.

My memories live strongly with me. My mind recreates a feeling with more life than my words can promise you; which is why the Bush played such a key role in it. I laid out my feelings in the post before, a sort of love letter to a fixture in my childhood. This episode, I wanted to showcase where the divergences in memory currents happen – as they differ from every human brain which encounters an event. Even when all these currents were within the same family.

My eldest sister lives quite distant from me. For most of my childhood, she was the adult who was rarely home to visit. Her perspective on home has a mosaic of pain and love which is not to be quaintly defined by even her little sister. As adulthood let us both into the same world, I asked her about her thoughts concerning our childhood, specifically revolving around the bush. She said that in your mind, things from your pasts tend to “stick out” because they represent something to you, For me, the bush meant a world of wonder and difference. For her it was an escape from a reality of caring for upwards of 4 siblings at any time and an elderly grandmother. It was a place where the neighbors would come over, bringing over exotic snacks and stories of their respective schools. While not outright rebellion it was freedom and individualistic – words undefined beforehand.

My older brother had very similar memories to my elder sister, yet for him it was more a place to test strength and skills. It was a place to relax, to dream alone, to catch privacy from the world in which he was thrust. He recalls literally jumping into the branches if only for a few seconds to get the smell of cedar, before church in the morning or a doctor’s visit for our grandma. He was an older sibling as well – so his responsibilities were vital to the running of the house. Mowing lawns, raking leaves, cleaning water out of our Michigan basement – and the bush brought relief. Solace. His life is a much fuller one now – marriage, life in general, post-military – but his memory of the bush is something which also invoked friends coming over and filling it. It was a retreat and yet also a place to test one’s strength. There had been a storm where the bush had been struck by lightning. One of her heavy limbs fell, causing a hole through which you could now see the sunset. This surprised my brother, who had jumped the limbs day in and day out – yet one storm altered the face of a familiar place forever.

The second sister of mine has so much to say she deserves her own book. Her memory of the bush is something akin to mine, yet also blended with ‘the older ones.’ She reminded me of how the bush was the feature we would tell people to look for when giving directions to our house, Evergreens could be found in nearly every front lawn on our street, but not so as any house would be nearly lost behind them. Her observations were related to the color, the smell, the feeling of the ‘leaves.’ The bark bit the fingers, but the leaves were soft as butter – while a layer of them lay brown and somehow still soft on the ground. Sunlight found its way into the cove of green, and so did life. Decay was not in the bush’s DNA. My sister watched as the world of the elder siblings spun into Volvo-tires and pavement, and another era of childhood began on the front porch. I wonder how much both our eyes are still focusing on those broken steps from between the branches.

The last sibling I brought into this whirlwind had a genuinely unique importance in his life. Though he does remember the evergreen fondly, it did not paint itself in his mind in terms of endearment. It was there, but at the point of time where I was almost obsessing over it, he had moved on to another place. It was not the front yard generally but rather, the driveway. He recalls hours that we spent on rocky-asphalt, bouncing half-full basketballs into an old hoop which towered over our heads; his thoughts of how we would get chunks out of the edges – eroding due to rain and Northern winters – to be used in our Real People and ‘chemistry’ games. His memory was not about the bush as much as it was about how the driveway was set in our lives. The day my parents repaved the driveway – the first time in over 40 years of residing at their home – is a day that my brother realized just how important the driveway had been The change of scene from being so familiar – it was not about maintenance or better aesthetic, or even better for the house in general. All those my brother would agree with. Yet, in all that good, is the loss of what was.

There in lies a great truth. The loss of memory means the tearing of reality. It is a scary moment relived over and over, or an emotionless field where nothing ‘sticks.’ I do not need to opine on this topic – only to state how important remembrance is, how cherished family history can be, but also how poisoned it can become. How changes are affected depend on what people do in the changes they find themselves. this is not necessarily a story about losing memories – that is a tale for another day. This story is about having them – even when the reality was different.

What is it to say after all these words? The love we siblings have for home, for the intimate details of an every day journey between the sun and the moon, I think is mirrored in others views on old school grounds, old play grounds turned into shopping marts and hospitals. Yet, these are things deemed outside of your control in an easy fashion – governments and communities decide together on differences. Even if you choose not to attend the meetings, they usually occur. Changes to a property alive still in all of our minds is more personal. While the decision involved you the children to some extent – it is our parents house, They did what they thought was right. It is not a ‘wrong’ choice which allows my momma to sit on her new front porch. It is not a bad thing that my father is able to walk on a smooth driveway free of holes his children may or may not have encouraged (I am sorry Dad – the asphalt made excellent ink though). Both of my parents are managing health concerns which are rapidly changing the way they did things before. Regardless of the endearments of some things, renovation is necessary. These changes cast the whole in a shadow – the 2d rendering of an impression in our mind became a model with features and movement. It became a model of the relationships woven through the recollections, the memories, the people. Change is not always a bad thing – it is what we do with it which matters to any ending. Is that not what growth is all about?

Acknowledgements:

Thank you to Karena, Jiles, Donielle, and Caleb for putting up with my rambling questions, terrible internet at the time of interview, and the love and support they have given to this little episode.

On Roots and where to find them

The Bush sprouted in front of the house long before my infancy. It had been there when my newlywed parents signed their first mortgage, when my eldest brother was in kindergarten, and as child after child joined our growing flock, the evergreen seemed to push itself to accommodate them all. At times I wondered if the tiny plant had just wanted a place to rest, a safe haven, disturbed only by the occasional bird. Whatever its original dream, it was blessed to be the guardian of a hoard of children. My mother quickly deemed it to be an eyesore, but at the same time stressed that the front yard was not to be played in under any circumstances. “Too close to the road,” she said, over and over.“You could get hurt.” So, the Bush became a playground, rocket, even a babysitter at times. A prickly, rough governess, but imaginative to its visitors.

All this happened while I watched in her shadow. The sweet, soft fern-like leaves fell over me like a curtain to my personal theater. Every time I tried to slip in, I hesitated with the fear of falling to the ground, not tall enough to swing into the cockpit of my siblings’ world. I pressed my face against the sun-speckled screen door, waiting for someone to reach the handle for me. Then I would creep to the edge of the cool concrete of the Porch, ’til, at last, I could reach the first branch and swing into Never-land. My youngest brother and I fashioned hats of the leaves and swords from sticks, displaying our summers worth of shells all along the grassy edge; somehow we failed to notice that, one by one, the nest was being emptied.

The day came that my mother got her wish. The shovels and six hard-muscled men arrived in the early morning, as if they had been whisked out of a bottle to do her bidding. From my room, I watched the limbs of the Bush recede, thinner and thinner, until at last they crumpled into a pile of twisted roots and green feathers. As the day turned over on its side, showing the red of her smile against the gold of her eyes, the Bush left the world in a spicy, fresh-cut grass assault on the senses, its bald place in the front yard tilled under but still full of her memories. My mother was overjoyed for the potential to get a new porch, unable to mourn the plant with any greater loss than “The shade was nice.”

The evergreen’s death bought an adventure of the house getting a face-lift. Aged yellow vinyl — not the kind you put music on, the kind that falls off a house every weekend — became caramel siding, plaster white was painted sienna desert, another bathroom and bedroom were added, yet the front remained a graveyard. It may have been filled in with rocks and the occasional sprinkle of flowers — contrasted by a shiny new door with a heron posed in frosted glass — but the old concrete was still there, bare and bleached by the sun as it had never been before. Yet our house was deemed improved because the Bush was gone, even when my mother’s new porch had to be postponed ’til the van and trucks were in working condition. Perhaps after the back deck was finished, or maybe when the ponds were all cleaned out would allow for some time. Summer after summer, fall bled into winter over and again for 9 years, eating away at the little porch until my mother fell on the now-shattered steps. At last, the concrete went the way of the screen door. Chocolate-brown and cream aluminum would be replaced by a wooden construction. As the house gained its many coats of appeal, it seemed to lose the charm and character it had once held behind the Bush.

The destruction and rebuilding of the walls changed the home in more ways than how it looked. My mother, due to her fall, found herself more and more often lying on the couch, hardly sleeping due to her pain. My father decided the lawn needed more attention than anything inside. A garden was planted and harvested, then allowed to go to seed. There was more than enough room for all of us now, but I still felt silenced, hushed. The door had been closed on me for so long, but I knew I was not going to wait any more years for the hole to be filled in my life. I was ready to move out of the shadows and find my own roots.

Life is not a concrete brick to be chipped away, moved from place to place ’til all that remains is a shadow of dust. It is a season of seasons, leaves that layer upon each other. Shells are buried, uprooting happens, clinging to a withered leaf allows for nothing but suffocation. I will always love my mother’s soft, hazel eyes and the twinkling in my father’s smile; the sunrise is just as amazing from their new porch as those long-lost sunsets. But I am not writing their story anymore.

Nothing proved this more than the view from my window. It wasn’t the familiar arms of a friend waving back at me, but the back of a rigid tree long since dead. A beautiful mummy, but only a band-aid over what used to be; when I would sit on the highest branch and watch the explosions of color in the 4th of July night sky, or a sunset on a Tuesday. Wrapping myself in what could have been is as blinding as merely dreaming of what could be; while I was waiting for somewhere to let me grow, all I had to do was turn toward the light.