Page 30 - WTP Vol. XI #6

23
Memoirs
In my mother’s old house, the handwork
of generations folded in drawers
and put away years ago. I’m unfolding them into squares and rectangles, and I am
a child again, listening to the crochet needles click like the seconds of the mantel clock. “Doilies,” my mother called them.
How I hated them—under every lamp,
on every table. There’s even a masterpiece, a bedspread heavier than an oriental rug.
But there they are—my mother, grandmother, great grandmother, aunt—clicking away,
the needles blinding as the sun goes down,
its light setting them on fire. The news
is on, and I’m waiting for Walter Cronkite
to say, “And that’s the way it is.” And it was: no one talked, my grandfather read what little his sixth-grade education allowed, and time decanted in the dark furniture covered
in plastic my legs stuck to all summer.
Immigrants, victims of the Depression—
it was as if that living room was the place they’d arrived at, and decided to go
no further. Survival filled the dead air. Like the way my great grandmother tucked what she was working on under her chin and the arm that hung at her side.
Her good arm never stopped working, the needles turning out another doily, ironed flat and spread on a table.
So here I am, sexton of the dead,
my cemetery of drawers filled with doilies, tablecloths, that rug of a bedspread
that must have taken a year to crochet?
A palimpsest of years, their past written
in the language of those clicking needles— a simple story I read and re-store,
that says: as long as we sit here crocheting, nothing can go wrong. And so they did, and that’s the way it was.
roberT Cording