Memorials

Last night the party was lovely, tomato plants in the windows, fragrant. So Portland what with the salvage wood houses and the full bar, the punk rock anarchist kids and the bike art. Bloomington is shrinking. The same people are everywhere, the nighttime people popping up during the day at the library or the coffee shop; the nighttime people look hazy in the light of day, not quite fully rendered. I must look like that as well, though the backs of my pants drag through puddles and the day thumps solidly around in my heart.

My aunt died today. Mother's Day of all days, proving the studies my mother oft cites about how people hang around for the big events: birthdays, Christmas. Her daughters were by her bedside. I remember the photograph of her in the faux fur and the red-tinted sunglasses walking along the Charles beside my far-less-glamorous mother. The diary en francais she sent me special for my birthday in the fourth grade, just after she had become an expatriate. The accent, muddled and continental, that my family mocked for years until I came to understand it, just this year, how she could forget she came from Chicago, Kansas, lands of flat and arid syllables. The scarf I gave her rich against her skin, festive over the purple pajamas. Her feet like a monkey's, little groping things. The separation of spirit and physicality so pronounced, her sharp mind a moving thing within a wizening body. How she was a writer and how important that always was to me. How it seemed to connect us at the end.

It's so cold and rainy out. This midwestern landscape she left behind. I feel very alone today in it. And I wonder again why they all scattered, those siblings, to nest in different parts of the world. What was so much more vital than kin? They're all hearing the news now. In California, Oregon, Georgia. In Connecticut my mother is alone in her little house in the Colonial woods. It just pains me, that solitude. And the solitude it begets.

I went to a cemetary today and read the names to myself. The gravestones without flowers. The old ones, the forgotten ones. It's comforting to me to think that someone is visiting my grandmother that way, her gravestone with the wheat etchings in Santa Cruz where none of her children live anymore. My grandfather in his mausuleum in Chicago -- someone will walk by and peep in and wonder who is buried there, what the stained glass means, who the flag was for. They're scattering my aunt's ashes in the channel. Between homelands, just like she always was.