Page 52 - WTP VOl. X #4

My antique jewelry box with the chipped wood veneer and intricate brass design on the lid used to be my Nanna’s. It houses a red velvet pouch.
I pull out the silver charm bracelet inside. I haven’t worn it since my teens when my family fell apart. Two of the charms, a cat and a Lucky 13 horseshoe, were never soldered on. Wearing it now, it feels like I’m carrying a little book around my small-boned wrist. There’s the first charm, that heart I was given by my stepfather when I was four. For later birthdays, my mother gave me the state of Virginia representing my time at camp and a silver Liberty Bell represent- ing our move near Philadelphia. Sometimes I tell my therapy clients that the goal of your life’s journey is not to be burdened with steamer trunks, old leather suitcases, valises filled with old shit, endings, hurts, the past, the sound of your mother yelling and your father leaving. The goal is sorting through, choosing what to take, deciding what you must have with you that’s useful in dealing with your present life. Hope- fully it is a manageable amount. Hopefully it is no more than a carry-on bag. Or my jangly bracelet of silver memories with a strong clasp.
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Clouds scatter across the roofs of the other suburban houses in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Big fluffy puffs moving fast toward Philadelphia in the late spring breeze. We are in the front yard next to the azalea bushes, and my mother has a peanut butter jar in her hand. She is catching the slow, black wasps as they come up from a hidden place in the ground. I am crouched on my heels, a bit away from her, a little afraid of what she’s catching. She wants to show
my sister and me how animals make their homes. She finds birds’ nests of woven weeds and grasses. She points out the wasp nest under the eaves of the long porch outside my bedroom. She pulls down a white cocoon from the ‘V’ in the slender branches of the pussy willow and tells us about the caterpillar liquefying itself into a butterfly. I think my mother knows many things. One afternoon when I come home from Stafford Elementary School, she is sitting on the chaise lounge in the backyard with a book and talking to a mockingbird, or so she says. Different bird calls rise in her throat as if she had soft rumpled feathers. My mother loves this house we now live
in. She isn’t working as a nurse right now and is, instead, fixing everything up. It was built for the de- veloper of the neighborhood. It’s the nicest house, and
inside it has a lot of extra closets and the biggest yard we’ve ever had, with woods in back and a creek. “We are never moving again,” she tells me, grimly, as she surveys Daddy, my stepfather, a tall man with a sandy- blond crewcut and piercing blue eyes, walking up the sidewalk between the flowers she’s already planted.
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I have my own room here. I sleep in my mother’s childhood antique, four-poster bed under the framed poster of the tapestry of the Unicorn in Captivity. It depicts a small horse with a horn in a fenced-in pen. My mother had seen the image at the Cloisters in New York City. She wanted me to have it because I like unicorns, especially one in The Little White Horse, my favorite book. Early in the morning I read it, along with the Narnia books stacked in a giant pile on the bedside table. It is the most com- forting feeling of all, knowing you have lots of books to hold like anchors.
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Some mornings when I don’t have school, instead of reading, I get up right when the sun comes up and long before everybody else does. I like the aloneness when it’s bright outside. It reminds me of when I was all alone at Hazelwild Farm Camp, but I don’t mind this feeling here. I go to the kitchen. I take a spoon from the drawer and climb up on the kitchen table
to eat a full spoonful of white sugar, twice. I love it melting down my throat. I open the back door and look for Tommy, all stripes and green eyes. He sleeps with me sometimes, so then I let us out together. The day glimmers and turns green, and the dew on the grass makes glinting sparks of light. It’s warm, early
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What We Hold On To
Deborah DerriCkSon koSSMann