Memory

Memory by George Ella Lyon I was going to love them but I didn't get to. I don't know what happened. They were busy. I grew up. Fords gave way to Chevies, then Mercurys. I don't know how it changed. One day I was little and live, the family arched over me like a tunnel of summer trees; then I was big and secret, a stranger outside their door, complaining of the heavy key around my neck. If I go back now, I can't enter all the houses. Earl and Papa Clayton moved to the graveyard. Granny May went after them. We've all got a room reserved there. Two name plates. No knocker. We'll all lie together without quarrel, bone kin. Do you want the green blanket? No, it's chilly tonight. I'll take the brown one with the red sweet-gum stars. Well, it's winter now, remember. Just pull that white spread over us all. What is a family but lives growing together, pulled apart, then crossed over again? Every turn I take memory turns, too, polishing pain the way water smooths rock. Is a family a group with a matching set of synapses, a chemical leap for the dipper on the back porch? Sometimes in the night memory sets my heart ringing. Hello? Hello? Is it you? And it's May in her hospital bed the week before she died, smiling in fearful triumph, "You like to lost me this time." Or Papa Clayton in the back seat when we should have had an ambulance, "No need to bother with the hospital. You might as well take me on to the cemetery ." And Grandpa Earl, what of him? He died at a sawmill, struck down like a tree by one blow of his heart. He never had mentioned death. "Get up from there!" he'd say. "If there's anything I can't stand, it's people snoring away the best hours of the day." I hear him in the night and wonder, Should I get up now? Am I lazy, wasting moonlight like this? May, Earl, Papa Clayton, forgive me. I am not like you: steady as a bowl, true as a level sight. My household is crooked and board-loose; the lap I have to offer is a seive. Where you knew the wood grain, the mitre, I know only the stress of language. Where you boiled jars and laundry, I steam open envelopes of dreams. Every task you gave yourselves to-threading the needle, steadying the saw-I resist, saving my skein for word stitches, oiling my blade for the fragrant buzz of words. What am I doing then among your memories, standing heart-deep in vanished rooms? Like sawdust, like lint from sheets shaken out, your voices tickle my throat. Listen. Old tunes on a new fiddle. It's Emma. Let me in. I've come home. 37 ...