to me, it is the idiosyncrasies that are so peculiarly woven through our beings, unique as a thumbprint, that make each of us who we are. All our little habits, rituals, fears, comforts; they make us so spectacularly human and wondrously enchanting. I love to absorb these little things about my companions, to ponder what put them there---a fear of bees, a particular wink, the way a woman bites her lip when anxious, they way a man melts when he smells lilacs----all these little things, the associations we make as we traverse this earthly experience, they enthrall me. I noticed recently that something ethereal happens to me when I happen to walk in the rain under an umbrella, something about the pinging sound of rain on rayon, it makes me feel dreamy, warm, viscous, like arms are lovingly wrapped around me. I thought long and hard about this, really allowed my mind to freely wander down the thread of association, and suddenly, I arrived at a memory that made my hand fly to my heart in longing and love, grief and joy. I remembered my grandmother Josephine, how when I was girl she refused to let me fall asleep alone, not ever. She would lie in my bed next to me, shush me and soothe me with her sweetness, until I drifted to sleep, and then she would creep silently out of bed. She always checked on me many times throughout the night, peering into my room, her wild curls made wilder by sleep, a crazed moonlit halo. She did this even when I was a teenager, she lay in bed next to me as I ambled towards sleep, she never let me fall asleep alone. I never felt safer or more cherished than those nights in her home. Now, as I started to let myself remember, the satiny bedspread, the rippled mirror on the wall, the sound her glasses made as she set them down on the night table, I remembered something else……I remembered that there was a window directly above my head, our heads, as we lay there and floated off to sleep together, a window of her little white house covered by a rusty tin awning, and on many rainy coastal nights as I lay there next to her, there was the sound of rain, pelting against the tin. Just like the sound of rain tapping my umbrella. It was as if the memory, this syrupy sweet little gem, was shipwrecked in my subconscious somewhere lost and shrouded in dark, until I stood in the rain under my turquoise umbrella and followed the string that connected me today to that little cocoa-haired girl, falling asleep to the sound of the rain and a beloved grandmothers breath, utterly loved and protected. I realized the waves of safety and comfort, the feeling of home, that always wash through me in the sound of rain pattering above my head were this, a unbeknownst memory of my beloved. I realized that those arms I felt around me all these years in the rain, were an echo of hers, always hers, and this is just another way that our loved ones never truly leave us, but remain forever imprinted on our cells, and our raindrops.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 00:41:28 +0000
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