January 9, 1980

Here is what I remember about my mother:

I remember her burying me in a bright pile of fall leaves.
I remember Sunday School.
And being tucked into bed at night.
I remember picking out wallpaper for the bathroom of our new house.
Lying on a big bed with her and my baby brother.
Green shag carpeting.
I remember one summer weekend at a lakeside cottage. My first bikini, polka-dotted. A floating raft, and one of her friends accidentally drinking the contacts she'd left in shot glasses overnight.
A parade where she wore a blue and gold genie costume that was so beautiful it took my breath away.
I remember watching her swim out into the ocean.
The feel of horseflesh rippling beneath our legs.
I remember the day she brought my sister home and placed her gently in my arms.
Long car trips late at night.
Hearing her sing James Taylor.
Her hands.

I remember opening the door to find her friend, weeping.
I remember someone holding me up to peer through a pane of gridded glass in a heavy wooden hospital door.
I remember the new dress I wore to her funeral, baby blue with a lace ruffle along the hem.
I remember sitting on my grandfather's lap because my grandmother and my father were so completely shattered by grief.
I remember not understanding any of it.

Twenty-six years. She's been gone now longer than she was here; I'm older than she will ever be. And if I don't remember much, I still have pictures, and all the stories told by my dad and my grandparents and my aunts and uncle. I have the journals she kept since she was 13, and her funky seventies jewelry that I wear almost every day, and her guitar sitting in a corner of my dining room. I have the Raggedy Ann that was hers when she was little, and boxes of letters, and her high school marching band uniform. Her wedding dress. A cassette tape.

And every time I look into the mirror, I can see her face.



"Fire & Rain"