object of memory

we must return to where it was lost / if we want to find it again

Month: June 2023

  • in the thicket

    in the thicket

    I grew up with a giant patch of wild raspberries. I would duck beneath a bow of leaves and thorns, and my backyard would disappear. Instantly I was transported into a forest of rubies. They hung heavy from the branches, and the brambles were so dense that birds could not penetrate the understory. I remember many mornings sitting on the ground, filling my mouth with the tart and sweet magic, getting mauled by mosquitoes but not caring, as the berries were just once a summer and sometimes in early fall, and their taste was unrivaled.

    I left the house this afternoon for the first time in several days. Life has been like that lately – I turn around and am unsure of where I am in time. I’ve been hiding a bit, hesitant, and aware that my head feels thick and slow and that it’s been a challenge to keep up with conversations. We have been in survival mode for over a year. Now that some of the restraints have been lifted, it’s been hard to know what to do, think, and how to feel.

    A raspberry patch is in a school garden across the street from my house. I began caring for it during the pandemic. It was overgrown with trees and weeds, and I spent hours working the soil and protecting seedlings from hungry birds and squirrels. Someone had planted raspberry canes. I trimmed them dutifully for three years, confining them to one raised bed.

    I couldn’t bring myself to grow or care for anything this year. Spring came and went, and I did not turn the soil in my backyard for peas and tomatoes. I didn’t touch the school garden. I couldn’t deal with the idea of having to help something survive, probably because every fiber of my being was dedicated to ensuring that my oldest child remained on this earth. My survival, in so many ways, depended on his.

    My oldest loved raspberries since the moment he began eating solid foods. He is the first one by my side when we gather blackberries in Vermont or strawberries at a local farm. The past few summers, I’ve gone out early to pick the school raspberries, then left a bowl for him on the kitchen counter. Even at eleven and twelve years old, he’d put the berries on his fingertips to eat them, and each time he went through the process, my heart would melt. Every so often, I’d have a dream where he and I were crouched beneath the brambles collecting the red fruits in our cupped hands, his blond curls glinting in the filtered sunlight. I am used to him by my side each summer, picking those berries. But this summer, he’s not.

    This afternoon I slipped on my clogs and shuffled over to the raspberry patch with a bowl in my hands. I started at the base of the thicket, picking, moving up to the top methodically. I stepped into the thorns, searching for the fruits hidden beneath. There’s an art to picking berries. You look at the color first, then gently wrap your fingers around the fruit. If it slides off the branch without effort, it’s ready. Any tugging and it’s not ripe enough.

    As I picked, I thought about my son. I thought about how difficult it is as a parent to reconcile the concept that you cannot fix everything, that sometimes, despite all your efforts and love, you are not enough – and that not being enough is okay, even though it hurts like a million daggers tearing apart your heart. I thought about how much I miss him even though it’s only been three days. I heard his voice as a baby and his sounds as a teenager. I smelled his hair. I felt his warm hand in mine.

    I put a perfect red raspberry in my mouth and let it melt. I felt the taste hit my senses, the tart at my cheeks, the sweetness beneath my tongue. My eyes teared as I imagined myself as a child beneath the brambles, then my son, our voices hushed, our fingers stained. I thought about how I’d encouraged him to visit the patch a week ago and that he’d declined, withdrawn and sad, ready to move on to whatever the future was, toward the uncertainty. I remembered how much my heart hurt when he said no to joining me, that sense of loss, not just for that moment but for all the struggles and heartaches of our recent past.

    There’s a bowl of raspberries on my kitchen counter. I’d like to say that they are waiting for my oldest son, but I know that they are not. He is in California, and I am in New Jersey. He is receiving the help that I could not provide. He is not eating these raspberries, but I am. One by one, I put them in my mouth and close my eyes. I feel the taste spread like the beauty of memory sprawling throughout my consciousness. I take in the flavor and all of the wonder that flows from it and think of my child, and know that, at some point, it will be okay.

  • lost in the middle of an island

    lost in the middle of an island

    Years ago, I lived way way east on the Upper East Side, east enough that it was a hike from the last stop on the crosstown bus, literally past the last avenue. It was a tiny tiny apartment – a sixth-floor walkup – and the stairs were spiral and outside and made of stone. I loved that apartment more than almost any other place I’d live in, mainly because, despite its minuscule square footage – I think it was 250 or 300 sq ft – it had three triple-tiered windows that went from ceiling to floor, and a tiny but useable balcony, which had once been for tuberculosis patients to “take the cure” but served as an excellent spot for looking out across Manhattan and the East River. Said apartment also had a kick-ass kitchen, which is pretty entertaining given that I rarely ate or cooked in it, but having counter and cabinet space seemed like an absolute luxury when I was twenty-one years old.

    Given its proximity to the river and the tall buildings that lined it, my street was often like a wind tunnel. I remember walking home from Lexington or the crosstown bus on frigid nights, the winter air cutting through my hat and scarf. When it snowed, which it often did in the years that I lived there, large drifts would pile up, and the swirls of white would consume the buildings like low clouds. I spent a lot of time watching the world through those giant windows.

    I remember waking one morning to a strange dimness, as though someone was cupping their hands over the sun and realized that it was snowing hard – storming – and nearly a foot already lined the streets. I love snow. I love how it mutes the world. I love the silence. I love the sense of solitude it can bring. Standing at my window that morning, I could barely decipher east from west. The streets were empty. I pulled on my running clothes and laced my sneakers tightly, then skip-slid down my six flights of outdoor stairs covered by windblown snow, flung open the gate to the building, and began to make my way west toward Central Park.

    Snow running is hard work, and by the time I reached the park, I was out of breath and sore, despite being a reasonably experienced runner, so I slowed to a trudge. I couldn’t see the roadway and paths, so I walked and listened to the sound of ice crystals falling thump thump into the pads of snow. The sun had emerged from the cloud layer, and its rays sifted through the tree branches, covered in white, like a winter understory, the snow standing in for the spring and summer leaves. I walked and wondered and listened to the sound of nothingness. There was no one else around and for a good hour, I felt like time had stopped.

    Then I got cold. Very cold. I pivoted and looked back at my tracks, now covered with a new layer of snow. I looked around and realized I had no idea where I was. I struggled to find a landmark, something familiar to give me a sense of where in the park I’d wandered to, but all I could see were trees. I panicked for a moment – these were the days before cell phones and watches with fancy GPS – and then took a deep breath and reminded myself that I was in a park in the middle of an island, and no matter what direction I walked in, I would inevitably hit one piece of the perimeter. I had run almost every inch of Central Park in daylight and darkness. It wasn’t possible to get lost, just sidetracked.

    Lifting my heavy, frozen feet, I began to run. The snow was well past 18”, so it was more like high-knee jogging, but as the blood started flowing back into my limbs, as I began to feel my fingertips and stopped obsessing over the fact that I’d had to pee for an hour and that I hadn’t brought money or subway fare, as I just fell into the ragged but still rhythmic breath that moved in and out of my lungs, as my arms pumped and heart pounded, and my eyes gained greater focus on the snowy landscape before me, I managed to find my exit. It was, of course, way north and on the other side of town, but I reached the semi-plowed street and visible sidewalks, and despite having to run an extra few miles back home, I got there eventually.

    I’ve been thinking about that morning lately – how beauty shifted so quickly to panic, how a journey through a place I knew with my eyes closed suddenly felt ominous, how lost I felt, how solitude morphed into alone, how hopelessness avalanched. Sometimes feeling lost in the known is more disorienting than being thrust into the unknown. It’s hard to remind yourself that you are also a park in the middle of an island. There are perimeters to every experience, even if they appear nonlinear. Even when storms blur things into gradients of white, there is depth beneath, there is underbrush, and there are clues to paths and exits and streets and subways and far-off rivers. Somewhere in there, the high-knee running shifts back to even strides and plowed sidewalks.

  • i move to keep things whole

    i move to keep things whole

    Recently, someone asked me if my brain ever stops churning. The short answer is not really, except for those moments when suddenly everything goes blank, and I find myself sitting on the floor of my office or lying on my couch staring at a ceiling or wall. I will admit that happens often, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I’ve used every last brain cell, and my entire being needs to recharge. I’m not saying this because I think I’m a brilliant human – it’s mostly that I don’t know how to turn my thoughts off, which for the most part, has resulted in years of terrible sleep and the amassing of large swaths of useless knowledge. Okay, not all of it is useless. I’m forty-five years old and have finally figured out how to knit most of it into something comprehensive, but my thoughts are still like one never-ending skein of yarn that is pretty consistently tangled.

    I read a lot. I love stories and poetry, but I’ve been immersed in nonfiction for the past few years. My office is filled with literature about teaching – pedagogy, art methods, and the importance of play. It’s also jammed with books about social history, autism, expressive art therapy, art history, and memoirs. My reader is clogged with research papers, some of which I’ve looked for specifically and others I’ve found while jumping down the rabbit hole of citations, which I call reference surfing. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I sit in my comfy office chair in the dark, think about the various things I’ve read, and envision these lasers of light linking one thing to another, like how I’d imagine synapses connecting to neurons.

    I mostly chalked this frenetic research and reading and pockets of sleeplessness up to OCD (indeed, I take meds for that), as the information would swirl and repeat in my mind, and I’d find myself wondering why I was thinking about it at all, what the point was. In the past few years, I’ve realized that I was building something. It’s taken half my life, but as my mother will not hesitate to tell you, I’ve always had to do things my way, and often, I come to the space where everyone knows I should be late because I’m carving my own ever-difficult and never-linear path.

    When your mind works in haphazard ways, you often feel like you don’t fit in. You might assimilate into situations and know how to present outwardly, but inside, you feel like a weirdo amidst a sea of regular people. As a little kid, I spent much time clinging to teachers. I was desperate for understanding, even if it didn’t appear that way on the outside. I didn’t have the language for what I was thinking or feeling, and I gave up on trying to express most of it at a certain point. That resulted in years of people saying, “You care a lot about me, but I don’t know you at all.” I said to someone recently, “I know I’m a pretty closed-up person,” they looked at me and said, “Ya think?” It was said in a caring and humorous way, but that does sum it up.

    Back to the never-linear, non-stop loop that is my head. Here’s what I learned this year: all that reading and asking questions and poking around in different pockets of information and finding joy in working with children and feeling unbelievably attached to the concept of advocating for those who can’t always express themselves in what we might consider “conventional” ways? It’s super personal, but simultaneously, it’s a calling, a realization that I know what my life’s work should be. I feel an unbelievable connection with those who yearn to be heard, seen, and understood. I feel the need in every fiber of my body. It’s not an “I’ll fix it” moment. It’s a “Let’s stop, let’s connect, and let me learn about you by letting you be yourself. You don’t need to have words. Humans speak their truth in so many ways. Let me see your truths. Then let’s work on how I can help the world understand you. Somewhere in the middle, languages will converge.”

    Some people go to concerts or museums and feel their world swirl with emotion. I get that feeling when I work with kids. Everything else melts away. Their art, their movement, how they fix their gaze or even breathe becomes a language, a pattern, and sometimes a puzzle. I look at children’s minds and emotions the same way that I experience an exhibit at MoMA or close my eyes and listen to a symphony.

    My favorite poem is tattooed on my wrist in Morse code (actually, it’s just one line because I have small wrists, but it’s the best line, in my opinion). It’s spoken to me in different ways throughout life. Still, lately, I’ve wondered if the best lesson of the text is that movement – physical, mental, metaphorical – keeps many of us from fragmenting. We connect to people, the environment, and our worlds differently. That churn, that deep need to understand others the way I had yearned for as a child, keeps me whole. And I would not trade that aspect of myself for anything.

    Keeping Things Whole

    BY MARK STRAND

    In a field

    I am the absence

    of field.

    This is

    always the case.

    Wherever I am

    I am what is missing.

    When I walk

    I part the air

    and always

    the air moves in   

    to fill the spaces

    where my body’s been.

    We all have reasons

    for moving.

    I move

    to keep things whole.