Tag: Memory

555: “What Do I Toss?” (Stephen Spotswood)

                “When I began the chore of writing all this down, I found I had to keep making the same big decision over and over again. What do I keep and what do I toss?” -Stephen Spotswood, Fortune Favors the Dead, pg. 98

                It certainly does feel like a chore sometimes: sitting down to type something out, to untangle and re-tangle thoughts and images into memories and scenes, people and relationships. There is so very much to put together. Today’s applecore, waiting on the cutting board to be sliced for the compost pile. My partner talking on a zoom call. My friends, a state away, and our long phone call. The cat I’d never seen before watching me through a window. “What do I keep and what do I toss?”
                And it’s not a chore, too. Also. At the same time. A delightful both-and, with meanings branching to meanings, moments nestling into movements. Because in the apple core is the cold water as I washed the apple this morning, and the rock of the knife, cutting slices to share with my beloved, and the sweet kiss of all that sunshine gathered into apple. In my partner’s zoom call (half overheard) are ideas about representation and community and delight. That’s what she’s talking about, and we talked about that too. Including on a walk some weeks ago, the sunlight warm on my bare arms as winter lingers in the shade of the trees. My friends a state away, and also their last visit, and the next time I might visit them. I don’t keep things or toss things. Maybe that’s why it’s less of a chore. I write in circles to feel the all this inside all this, circling and inside, again and again. A cat watching me through the window. The next time I walk by it’s gone, but we’re woven together. In its fur I felt warmth, a stranger, and I also felt the warmth of a cat I knew when I was nine.

by Azlan

523: “Comes Back” (Hap Palmer)

                “Sitting in a high chair, big chair, my chair, sittin’ in a high chair, bang my spoon!
                -Hap Palmer, “Sittin’ in a High Chair”

                “She always comes back, she never would forget me…”
                -Hap Palmer, “My Mommy Comes Back”

                This week I’ve been showing my beloved Maria José some of the places where I grew up. 
                The path outside my dad’s house, grassy now and scattered with dry pine needles, but deep with snow midwinter when I’m 9, stepping outside to help him shovel. 
                The pier at the lake where we jumped in, the cool dark breaking open to hold us.
                The beach where, at 16, I built a warm, dry little driftwood house with my best friend.
                The pool where my mom held me in the water, and later I learned to swim, somewhere back before my memory of years and ages.
                The hills where I watched tadpoles and frogs, always unsure how one becomes the other, already waist deep in the wonder of mud and algae. 
                Tonight, inside after these places, we listened to songs I remember from before I remember. I’m struck by how lush and joyous such childhood tastes of the world could be. Worlds so full of flavor. I sit with how scary, how sad, these tastes could be. I was a kid sometimes so lost. And grounding. A little more than a year after our wedding, it’s a delight to be sharing these children we were, these delights and uncertainties we’re rooted in, these places we grow.

by Azlan

473: “Olfactory Memory” (Feurat Alani)

                “Olfactory memory is the hardest kind to erase. It’s the most emotional, the most arbitrary. It opens the doors without knocking.” -Feurat Alani (trans. Kendra Boileau), The Flavors of Iraq: Impressions of My Vanished Homeland, #728

                My love and I are moving into our new home. Today we were gardening in the yard together, weeding around the echinacea and watering the rhubarb and finding a tomato plant nestled in tall grass (hurray!). The smell of all these leaves and stems and soils wash through me.
                What are my olfactory memories that open the door without knocking? So many—and sometimes like a burst of wind they’re here and then gone, hard to locate, impossible to pin down. But a burst of sea air: sometimes I step outside a car near the coast and childhood moments in sand dunes and surf burst around me. Bay trees. And eucalyptus trees, their scent curling like their dropped bark. Beeswax from making candles. Sweat, the smell of bodies, of hiking up into mossy forests. I love the way smells pick me up and carry me, not a flood to lift my heavy body but magic to turn me into mist, swirling here to somewhere else. I love being pulled away from myself which is also being pulled back. 
                I wonder what these olfactory memories are for you. Not the ones you might think of, now, if you tried to remember, but the next one that pushes all through you without knocking on the door.

by Azlan