{A quick note: We'll be at The Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA tomorrow at 3pm, for a reading and to be a part of their Crafternoon. I'm looking forward to seeing some of you there!}
Yesterday, I took a solo drive up the coast to visit a very special lady. I wanted to visit with her, and to hand-deliver a copy of my book to her - she, being my very first reader. The one who wrote me letters each week of my childhood (I always wrote back), the one who always told me I was a writer. I never really believed her, but I also never stopped writing to her. I'm so grateful for that - and so very much more, of course. She's given me so much. So yesterday, I went to see her, and being the way that Alzheimer's goes, she didn't know who I was. Insisted, in fact, that she did not know me. That's okay, I said. I know who you are, I said with as much strength and joy as I could, barely holding back my tears. After a half an hour of this struggle, I spied an old photo album out of the corner of my eye. Ah, yes. The rest of our afternoon together was spent there in those pages of photographs from the 1930's. She may not have known my name or anyone else from her shorter term memory, but she could tell me the name of everyone in that album - old boyfriends, schoolmates of hers, homes and cars and vacations (how amazing our minds are). And when she stumbled on the names, or when the stories got all jumbled up, as they all inevitably did, I finished them for her. Because I remember. This is what we did - on hot summer days at her farmhouse on the hill when it was just the two of us - open the trunk of albums and turn page by page as she told the story of each photograph and I begged for more. Yesterday, I told her some of those stories, as best as I could remember them. The story of being in beauty school in Boston and all the fun she had dancing with the Navy boys when they came into Port. The story of her handsome husband and how they met. The story of her sisters, her mother, her daughters and their loves and their losses. She was always the family memory keeper and storyteller - the one documenting it all in words and photographs. I've always loved them, but I don't know that I've ever felt so grateful for those photographs of hers as I did yesterday. At first, they were just a familiar comfort for she and I both as we struggled to have a conversation. But then, they took us both back - she, perhaps to the time of the photograph itself, and I, to her telling of the stories that meant so very much to me. There in those pages yesterday, I am sure we understood each other.
