the things I carried from home

The things I carried from home: I dump my purse out onto the bed. What a mess. No wonder it’s so heavy. Definitely in need of sorting. To keep, to discard.

Ok. My wallet, the eyeglasses I need for driving, four tubes of lipstick, all the same color that I bought before we moved which I now don’t like, a small pouch with eye makeup in case I get stuck somewhere overnight, chewing gum, two check books, cough drops. Crumpled tissues.

 A small silk pouch that spills out with beach sand from my grandmother’s summer home along the Boston shore, the print of my bare foot on the wet sand the morning she walked me into the freezing Atlantic surf and said, Maidalah, we’re Ukrainian, this is good for you. Keep.

There’s a glass vial with a small hand written label Open Slowly so I do, and the  fog from Big Sur is set free, strokes my cheek, murmurs like a wave breaking against stone, says did you think we would let you leave without us? I cry from homesickness. I am so far away, I say, sniffling, blowing my nose. How far? asks the fog, folding me into her arms.

There’s a pocket deep inside my purse and I open it cautiously. My heart is on alert, a familiar scent, a warning signal in the air. Tucked among tissue paper folded twice, three times, are the blue bed socks I slipped onto my mother’s swollen feet the night she killed herself. Or I helped her die. It all depends on how I turn the viewfinder. Do I want these? Can I put down the burden of her death all these years later, kiss her soft cheek one last time and move on? Discard pile.

A soft sound from the bottom of this pocket…my father’s whistle the last time I saw him, dressed in a tux, white carnation in his button hole, off to a party with my mother, both dazzling in their youth and beauty, and me just twelve years old. And now in this new land all these years later, he has tracked me down and found me, whistling memories of home at my front door.

Photos tumble out. My dead ones… my beloveds, my family and friends, my lovers, my brother… the photo of the two of us as kids holding hands, an unspoken promise to keep each other safe. Ok, I say to him, you were broken and I could not fix you but here’s the deal. I’ll carry my love for you always and hope that wherever you are, it will be a small piece of the healing you now carry.

More and more and more from this purse that seems to have no bottom.

The grease from my hands when my first husband taught me how to change the sparkplugs in my Studebaker pickup. The night I came to bed wearing nothing but these pearls. The first inbreath when a new lover entered me…I carry that holy song in my cells, in my flesh.

And here, a locket with a tiny eyelash from every baby that did not live to term inside my womb. I carry their spirits, their unformed limbs, their names only the angels knew. I carry them inside me still, a seed always in potential, asking for more, for water, for life. Keep. Keep.

I carry every song I ever composed on my piano that became stardust. I carry every piano I ever left behind. I carry every story I did not write every regret that still haunts me every sorrow I was too frozen to grieve every grief I said was really no big deal, honestly, I’m fine. I carry every ounce of soul I bartered for tarnished approval every self-doubt that stopped me from dancing naked under the full moon. Every hand that ever touched me in places it was not welcomed every meal I ever ate when I was not hungry every strip of flesh I tore off to say I’m sorry forgive me for sins I did not commit. Discard. Discard. Discard.

I carry the matches to set these regrets on fire, to create a blaze that brings down the wind that spreads the news that we have been forgiven, that there was never anything to forgive, that we are loved beyond our understanding, beyond what we believe ourselves worthy to receive, but open the wind insists, pressing on our hearts. Know yourself to be love, arrived from love and dissolving into love, carrying and setting down all notions of anything but love.

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Read more stories like this in my book The Ripening: Essays on Love, Loss, Marriage and Aging available on Amazon.