Who Are We?

The first thing she notices are the bushes.

They reach over the sidewalk, forming an arch of green. 

Ducking beneath them, she thinks of her mother, reduced to ashes in a box.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Yet here, at this house, she is everywhere. Every corner hosts a memory.

Tomatoes, plump and red on the vine.

Tears over patent leather shoes lost under a bed.

A Christmas tree with presents piled high beneath it.

Marital discord played out on the front lawn, community theater for all the neighbors to watch.

She can’t remember one without the other. 

After all, what is the good without the bad?             

We do not choose our memories.

And although the outdoor drama was loud, it was merely a distraction to the great unraveling inside the walls.

Suitcases packed. Heavy footsteps out the door. With barely a backward glance, a distraught woman left with only three small children as her mirror. Children, it seems, are a most unreliable reflection.

Now, she watches her own ramble through the house where she once lived. Where she huddled around a radio hoping for a snow day and roller skated over the cracks in the sidewalk. Where she sat in bed and read novel after novel.

Her oldest sits in the living room, her youngest beside him. Together, they thumb through old magazines.

She glances over at her dark-haired son. He is lost to her now. She finds herself holding her breath around him, afraid he might fly off into the atmosphere, all teenage angst and resentment.

These maternal ghosts haunt her. All her mistakes stack up. For hasn’t she played her own part in marital theater from time to time? Hasn’t her own jagged voice traveled out the window and down the driveway?

She reminds herself she has built something different.

She has built something new. 

Yet who are we without our own familial baggage weaving silvery threads through our landscape?

Another son traces the surfaces of each room lightly. Table, lamp, chair. Though his sight is perfectly intact, he absorbs the world through touch. It’s always been this way for him. Autism blurred the lines.

Her own fingertips graze the bookshelves. She notices familiar titles, sent over the years through the mail. Ann Patchett. Nora Ephron. Barbara Kingsolver.

Their connection has always been other people’s stories. It was easier, perhaps, than examining their own.

Take what you want, the tall man urges. They share the same eyes, the same smile.

She picks things up and puts them back down again.

A rhinestone pin, a teacup with a chipped rim, a bright pink sewing kit full of half-used spools of thread.

Photo albums are spread out in the dining room—the special space reserved for Thanksgiving dinner and birthday cakes. Leafing through the vacation pictures with her daughter, she thinks of salty air. Towels on sand. The sound of waves crashing upon the shore fill her ears.

Earth’s cymbals.

A realtor has been arranged.

The house will go to another family.

They will plant new flowers. They will make new music. They will find new cracks.

We do not choose our memories, it’s true. 

We choose where to dwell.

We choose where to change. 

Standing on the threshold, she decides to savor the color, the light.

Bright blue spools of thread, pink blossoms in summer, green and red beneath the tree.

Jumping in the waves beneath an endless summer sun.

Stepping outside, she holds them in the palm of her hand. 

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

The tomatoes on the vine are long gone.

The flowerbeds are overgrown.

Earth’s symbols.

She closes the door.