I’ve been working on this particular memory for the past
handful of weeks. The memory crept from the right side of my mind, from the back
and bottom toward the top and front (though I don’t suppose the mind has
geographic analogs to the conventional locations given to the brain). I felt it
as it was creeping and once the memory announced itself to my conscious
awareness, my entire body shivered with pleasure.
My daughter Isobel, our dog Happy and I had returned home
from a short camping trip and I was sorting out our supplies and washing up the
dishes and utensils in the white plastic wash basin that we use when we go
camping. We are a household in which
dishes are hand-washed —we are mechanical-dishwasher-less – so hand-washing our
camp-cooking supplies once we returned home wasn’t an unordinary occurrence.
What was out of the ordinary was that I decided to use the camping white
plastic wash basin to wash the dishes, rather than using my typical in-the-sink
method. That’s when the memory wiggled
its way into my mind (Such memories tend to come to me when I am in a relaxed
and un-analytical and embodied state of being.). A couple of days later I told Simeon about
the memory, but I couldn’t follow it any further until it reminded me about
itself again tonight.
As long as I can remember, and I only remembered this once
the memory reminded me to remember it, my Gramma Jewell has used a white
plastic wash basin to wash the dishes. As
far back into my own history as I can cast my mind, my Gramma Jewell has had
this practice, and she continued this practice until my aunt moved her and my
grandpa out of their home to live with her, followed by moving my Gramma into
an assisted living facility after my grandpa died. After that, my Gramma didn’t
get or need to do dishes any more, and until my aunt moved them, my grandparents lived in the
same home for decades, in Menlo Park,
California. And they lived in a strangely modest way. For
my entire life, or at least as long as I can remember, they had the same
furniture and style of dress, they adorned their walls with art rented from the library, and their diet
was sparse and narrow-band. There were other seemingly related practices, too –
they walked or took public transportation rather than drive their old-model car. And during one of the California drought
summers, my Gramma, so as to conserve scarce water supplies, pulled up by hand
all of the lawn in the front yard until all that was left was a hard earthen
surface (Though now I suspect it was as much about water conservation as about
preventing my grandpa, who was quite a bit older than my Gramma, from having to
mow the lawn.). Despite all of these indicators of a kind of carefulness and
frugality, never have you met more generous folks! Nor more well-traveled. In
addition to helping the rest of us live, they used their savings to visit the
Wall of China, New Zealand, the British Isles…when I was little I fantasized
they’d take me with them on a trip someday.
I never had the opportunity to go on a grand global
adventure with my grandparents, though I do have intense memories of walking
all over Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and “The City” (San Fran.) with them, and of
sitting on my Grandpa’s lap when I was seven years old to watch Charlie Chaplin
films at the Stanford University auditorium (And I should add that I had
recently been burned by hot oil, I had a third-degree burn on my left arm which
emitted a unavoidably rancid odor, but my Grandpa held me close
nonetheless.). I also remember my
“R-and-R” trips to visit my Grandparents during my late teens and early 20’s
when I was on break from my undergraduate and graduate studies. I always looked
forward to talking with my Gramma about all the books I was reading and big
ideas I was thinking about. We weren’t just Gramma and Granddaughter, we were
comrades.
So tonight I was listening to the Democratic National
Convention coverage as I washed-up dinner dishes. And as I was washing-up the dinner dishes I
caught out of the corner of my eye a hummingbird flitting through the persimmon
tree in the backyard. I had made a
special dinner for Isobel to celebrate her first day of school: a little game
hen, mashed potatoes, and roasted garden veggies. I washed the dinner dishes in the white
plastic basin which instigated this remembrance of my Gramma Jewell. Earlier, as
I was harvesting veggies for supper and sowing carrot and radish seeds for a
autumn harvest, a sexy hummingbird couple who was completely enthralled with
one another took a temporary interest in me, hovering over me as I bent over
the garden. The summer garden is winding
down—perhaps a week more of tomatoes, the beans are done and so is the
lettuce. The herbs are still going
strong but it is time to sow new carrots and radishes (and maybe beets).
