I was visiting with my 96 year-old grandmother at her room in the care facility. She was recounting her childhood in Ireland, every moment crystal clear right down to the burnished gate and the blades of grass, a variegated carpet of green. She sat in her Queen Ann chair, back straight with as much dignity as she always had. She could have been sitting in her living room 20 years earlier. She would occasionally stop and ask “Whose daughter are you, now then?” I always gave her the same answer and she would nod, look out the window, and continue.
Like bricks tossed in the yard for a future build, my memories are always there for me. Snapshots fill my head, yet calling them stones seems to better fit the weighty things. They need heft to keep them from floating away.
I realize now that, like my grandmother, most of the heavier ones were gathered when I was young, before I started to drive and my static eye was replaced by endless clinical scanning. Scenes of a town that no longer exists, flashes of family with Christmas trees and birthday cakes, travel logs from the seat of my trusty bike, idyllic snaps of trolling low tides from annual holidays at a low-end shack on the waters edge – all added to the pile.
With these inner keepsakes, I would move forward into new and different roles. Retirement meant hitting refresh yet again and creating another story. As I changed work, life, home, I happily toted my weight with me to set up shop and build a comforting new wall to make the place my own. That is what we do. It’s the old lamp, the rug worn at the corners, boxes of yesterday, the memory stones. That is how I have always changed the new into a comfortable new normal. But the wall does not keep me in, it’s behind me, allowing me to walk about to see what is out there, knowing I have the familiar with me. It is my strength and the thing that gives me depth and balance in a new landscape.
As I think back, I can see that I don’t remember everything in my life, either because of a multitasking existence or age is just beginning to take hold. With some good genes and a little bit of luck, my memory stones will keep, so I too can share the stories of a life well lived.
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