It’s not that I’ve lost my way; I am just not yet sure where I am going. For a time, I was sure that I knew: the activities of my future were far in the distance, many rotations of the sun from the rhythm of today. There was much between my tasks of the day and the elusive vision that was to come. I liked it that way; I didn’t question that there would be more than what was right in front of me.
It’s hard to say just when the faraway fields began to close me in. I look to my love, who first knew me when I was almost still a child.
I ran across the grass with a freedom that has been all but lost with the passage of time. If I left my white leather strapped sandals on the porch, my bare feet could take me faster to race my sister to the ice cream truck. Still, she always won.
If it was a good day, the neighbor lady would call us over for a visit. She would sit on a chair in front of the picture window in the room that faced our house. For what might have been hours and with my face still stained from my Fudgesicle, I brushed the neighbor lady’s soft brown hair, separated it into at least a dozen sections, and fastened each with a brightly-colored band. The neighbor lady always smiled and told me how pretty I had made her. Sometimes, her husband would come into the room and offer me a drink of his beer. He smiled a lot, too. I didn’t want any of the beer, though he was quite persistent.
I skipped until the day I fell hard on the concrete. I danced until my sister’s friend told me I looked funny. And I dreamed until I woke up.
Deep inside, we all have a need to mean something to others. We need to matter to someone, to be worth something for who we are inside. The older I have grown, the more I miss who I used to be. Is that what we are here for, to complete the circle and to return to who we were, and who we really still are inside?
My sister sent me a little box of treasures this Christmas, specifically some flower essences, a crystal, and a bar of soap packaged in a brown box, all zipped together in a silky pouch embellished with ribbon flowers. She knows me like none other.
There was something about that little brown box. Without even opening the soap, my reveries carried me back to 1985, when I was setting up my room at the Delta Gamma house, blasting the Cocteau Twins, specifically “Pearly Dew Drops Drops”, from my new push-button turntable. The Crabtree and Evelyn drawer liner that I used on that day smelled just the same as the soap that my sister sent me thirty-three years later. For a little while, I longed to be that college girl again: confident, driven, with a clear picture of what her future would hold.
But it didn’t.
I write because it connects me to others, but also because it connects me to parts of myself that have been nearly lost, if not for the memories that are called up with experiences that catch me as they come.
Some years ago, we decided not to exchange Christmas gifts anymore. I am not sure my sister or I have paid perfect attention to this declaration; we have found “things” and celebrated our sisterhood in a more random manner, with similar, though subtle, fanfare.
My sister was given the vinyl Butterfly Child when she had surgery as a young girl. I was secretly jealous, not of the surgery, but of the special attention that she received and, mostly, that she had the Butterfly Child. It was sort of like an animal and a person at the same time. Its suit was an array of the best colors, and there was sparkle to its wings. It was fantastic.
Over the years, my sister kept the Butterfly Child through maybe a dozen moves. At one point, she passed it along to one or another of my children, which was probably hard for her to do, and it hasn’t turned up in years.
I miss the Butterfly Child.
My days are a pageant, rich with things I cannot interpret, and rich with nothing at the same time. In the sparseness of nothing, still I am rich. I don’t like the taste of beer, and I would not have liked it when I was four.
Christmas is past, and the boys will be leaving soon. I have swept up a dustpan full of pine needles, Lego heads, and remnants of precious days together, spun too quickly on time’s impatient wheel.
I found the Butterfly Child…just an image, but there it was, nonetheless. My painter friend has captured its spirit, and my sister is going to get that sparkle in her bright green eyes, and this time I will beat her to the ice cream truck.