chasing memories

awakened by spring’s breezes

melting icicles

“Outside my window the world is dove gray…a late spring snow … powdered snow covering tree branches like the powdered sugar she sprinkled on the top of one layered cakes.  

The silence of snow gently interrupted, ‘Why was I sent to that school with Donna?’  Donna, her first born.  A black and white framed photograph reminds me of the softness of her permanent like curls crowning her head and the same unabashed joy of our mother…our mother before she was our mother.  The photograph belies her strawberry blond curls…golden tipped curls.  

‘“So she would not be alone.’  Alone…the same aloneness that accompanied her during those years she was separated from her family…sent away to school?  

“Me, the second born…given a purpose at birth, A playmate… a barrier, a protector against being alone.  

“There were those nights when darkness became like a blanket that settled the house into a quiet silence.  A silence that opens a door to a private passage to a realm where thoughts and images become ethereal and reality is colored by the imaginings of self free to roam.  And then…unexpectedly, consciousness shifts to a gentle voice, “ring ring” responded to with, “hello.”  Uninterrupted exchanges between sisters, separated by darkness—confiding, sharing, questioning—creating private night time stories lulling us into sleep.  

…

“My mother’s grief  … her felt emptiness … her loss of her first born child and first born grandson…together in one grave…not alone. Her emptiness hidden within a Sanskrit word, Vilomah…against the natural order…a parent whose child has died.  A Vilomah who, in later years, would also be a parent whose two sons had died.”*

*cited: b c kofford, My Mother came to Visit