Memories are not, I think, narratives we remember as much as impressions, images and sensations. In that I am in agreement with Proust. Such imprints seem, at least to me at this great distance from the events, a little arbitrary although not like events seen through a rose-tinted lens. Who knows, though, whether they are the source or result of the narratives in which they are now framed.
A massive organization project is underway in our home. The first task involved the ephemera of my Dear One’s childhood, his schooling, and his writing. This project set in motion a game of musical drawers as our separate lives were relocated to designated areas. Among the folders and boxes belonging to me were heaps of loose photographs, images which I have started to sort by decade and experiences.
Do the pictures revive the memories or create them? I am not sure.
The first home I must have known would have been the little brick house on Harmony Drive in Vienna, Virginia. We lived there until I was about four, until my brother J. was perhaps a year old.
There was a screened-in room at the back of that house. On the table where I sat there was a toaster and as the coils turned red, waves of heat created the illusion of ripples in the screen. There was a sandbox in the yard beyond, and I often tasted the sand, convinced it would one day taste good. It never did.
playing in the sand
I remember a time lying in bed in the living room. The room was dark and I have no sense of color, no recollection of the bright pattern evident on the curtains in discolored old Kodacolor prints. My sister P. was there. Was this when we had German measles? When our parents were sailing the Aegean on the yacht Thendara courtesy of my mother’s parents?
Maggie, the toy Manchester terrier
I cannot tell whether I remember our Irish setter, Shamrock, who met an untimely end due to a propensity to chase trucks. I should remember the toy Manchester terrier, Maggie, who was his successor, but memories of her date to 1959 and on.
Around 1956 we moved from Virginia to Cambridge, Massachusetts, via the maternal homestead at 161 Main Street in Hingham, Massachusetts but this stay is blurred with one the following year prior to our relocation to Cleveland, Ohio. Our new home, an apartment on Everett Street, a few steps from the northeast corner of the intersection with Massachusetts Avenue, is still there and looks much the same, at least on Google Maps.
The images in my mind feel like memories: the inglenook at the entry and the fireplace there; the dining room table placed to the left of the door to the kitchen. I remember that we draped a cotton-flannel sheet over a floor lamp to form a tent and that the fabric scorched and nearly burned. I remember—or think I do—a window seat and a patch of warm sun in my parents’ bedroom, a newspaper lying on the floor, and my efforts to read the headlines. Then there was the green gingham dress and bonnet my mother sewed for my sister for a Maypole dance. The dress had black velvet ribbons over the shoulders and above the sleeves.
straddling the cannon in the Cambridge Common
In Cambridge we went once, perhaps more often, to the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see the famed glass flowers of Leopold Blaschka (1822-1895) and his son, Rudolph (1857-1939). I remember being about on eye-level in spaces that seemed to be all marble floors and dark woodwork, and being warned not to touch the cases lest vibrations damage those delicate works of art.
The memories become clearer, more numerous, more detailed and crystalline by the fall of 1957, but those are not memories that call to me right now.
Among the old photographs is one that shows P. and me on benches either side of a picnic table in the screened room at the back of the Vienna house. We are in nightgowns and cereal bowls are laid before us. I do not, however, see a toaster, nothing that could produce the heated breeze that distorts the screen in my memory.
toast for breakfast
We did have a toaster, though. I see it on the formica-topped, chrome-edged kitchen table in a photograph a mouse has nibbled.
reading the funny papers
Was I reading those headlines in Cambridge? Perhaps. In this picture taken in Vienna I certainly seem intent in my examination of the funny papers.
time for a nap
I remember this bed and bedroom in the house on Miles Road in Hingham that belonged to Granny and Gramps. In fact, the bed later belonged to me. I think it is naptime; I look more than half asleep. Maybe that is why I do not remember my mother turning down the bed and untying my sneakers with such care. She looks so girlish in the picture that I wasn’t even sure it was she but the haircut is the same one she wears in a picture taken in the kitchen in Vienna and so is her blouse.
I wish I could remember for sure.