As I sit at the pull-out writing desk of my mother-in-law’s secretary, I chance to look at the transom window over the front door of my tiny house. While some days might find me gasping at what I see, on this day I cannot suppress a short but sweet laugh.
Cobwebs cling to the decor pieces that have sat on the sill of that small window for the last seven years, through a half-dozen earthquakes, including one with a nearby epi-center. I’ve climbed a ladder many times to run a duster along those objects, but not recently. I do not mind the wisps. Dust particles cling to an industrious spider’s gossamer strands, the whole of it fluttering in the air stirred by the ceiling fan. If I crane my neck backwards to peer a dozen feet overhead, I will see inches of dust on the moving blades. Had I not removed the plastic shade that once covered the bulbs, it, would sport the accumulated dirt which haunts my busy life.
The pretty objects in that window predate my life here. Two pottery bowls belonged to the mother-in-law at whose secretary I sit. I remember walking through her house just before its sale, a few months after her husband followed her in death. Everything of significant monetary or familial value had already been claimed by my soon-to-be-ex-husband and his sister. What they had left spoke to me of Jay and Joanna as I had known them. The German beer tankard I gave my father-in-law for his birthday; the little silver cross on a delicate chain came from me to Joanna on her birthday. I gave her twin sister a matching crucifix. I lifted Joanna’s from the little box in which she kept it and felt rising tears. I held them back.
Tall crystal vases beside each bowl remind me of my own mother. In truth, I think one might have been a wedding gift to me and my second husband, but for certain, I took the other from my parents’ home after my father died. In the week that my siblings and I spent clearing that house of the collected memories of the forty years of our family’s occupation, I touched china, silver, wood, and cloth. I took one piece of furniture: my mother’s vanity. Months later, someone broke into my little brother’s storage unit and took it, along with half of her china set and a couple of boxes that I never inventoried.
Of my haul from the clear-out, I still possess a handful of things: That vase; my father’s oldest hammer and little pry-bar; the yellow pitcher that stood at my mother’s bedside for her agonizing last months. Anything else fell by the wayside at the time of my westward decampment. I gave a lot to my son and nieces; I think the woman who staffed the front desk at my law firm still has a few swiftly packed crates in her basement. You would think that I might take better care of that which remains.
The four small jars in the center of the group most keenly touch my heart. My son, his best friend Chris Taggart, and our two foster children Mikey and Jacob filled those jars with colored sand at the Renaissance Festival twenty-six years ago. We hauled Jacob around the muddy paths in a stroller, the three older boys scampering in front, darting in and out among the delightful mix of hale and hardy swordsmen, lusty maidens, and blue-jeaned visitors. Mikey kept turning back to check on his brother, to make sure that I had not disappeared, to test his boundaries. I gestured him forward while Patrick and Chris reached for his hands and moved him along the path, flanking him with the tender protectiveness that only small children can portray.
A lifetime later, the day has sucked most of my energy. I work hard; I push myself; and I have too many self-imposed responsibilities. Additionally the terrible opinions gushing forth from an institution which I once revered drag at my soul. Each new day brings another atrocity from a government that I once respected, in a country which of late I had been proud. Measured against the news of contemporary America, the dust on the jars and the grime on my window seem like the most first-worldly of problems. Inconsequential, even.
As the evening air cools my small dwelling, I compose a billet-doux to a certain young woman in her twenties contemplating the decades stretching before her. My former self, I begin. Take the other fork! Any time you have a choice between a friendly smile and a puzzled grimace, go with the grin! Pick blue jeans over pressed khakis; forswear formal for gingham; let yourself be engulfed in a bear hug and shake your head at the stiff embrace. Dance though your legs stumble; climb regardless of your weak back; read more poetry; gather more wildflowers; sit more often with your eyes closed on the edge of a cliff. Any cliff. Walk in fast-running streams.
But then memories spill from those dark corners in which they have lurked, waiting to be sprung. I vividly recall wild laughter as I struggled against the current of the Meramec River, my drenched clothes clinging to my body. My older brothers forged ahead, looking back, taunting me in raucous voices. Once in a while one or the other of them would wade back, grab my shoulders, and pull me upright. At the little campsite perched on shore at a bend in the river, my mother unpacked what we would need for the night while my father built a fire. I have no recollection of anyone else, just Mark, and Kevin, and Mom, and Dad, a rare weekend when turmoil and terror stayed home while we went out into the world and met its wonder.
Perhaps I should write easier words to the girl that became this grey-haired, bent woman nearing seventy. She certainly tried to experience what she could of life’s more delicious offerings. She slept in tents and cabins. She rode across Missouri on the back of a Yamaha 150. She went nose to nose with a seething professor and challenged his ignorance of J. R. R. Tolkien. She bargained with the gods. She dared to send her writing into the unknown for anyone to judge and find wanting. She cradled one child in her arms and many others in the protective shroud of her legal prowess. She stood for love; she cried for truth; she raised her voice for justice. When life deserted her, she packed her bags and staked her claim in foreign territory where not one single soul spoke in the accent of home.
I keep a folding stepladder behind my mother-in-law’s beautiful cabinet. During my last divorce, I asked if I could retain it, even though it came into my house with my soon-departing spouse. He allowed as how I needed it more than he would, being short, and now alone with no one to reach the upper cupboards. It’s sturdy and stable; from its topmost step, I can reach that transom window and wipe away the cobwebs. By and by, I shall; but for one more night at least, I will not disturb the sleeping spider, who has likely earned her rest as much as I.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
The Missouri Mugwump®
