Remember when

A letter to my mother in law, Mary Tomlin

I’d almost forgotten the coolness of a spring evening with the smell of lilac lingering around the rocking chairs on the porch. Can you hear the bobwhites calling out to one another? That always makes me think of home.

The rhythmic rocking could lull me to sleep, except that the children’s laughter cascades through the stillness. They’ve just caught the first of a million lightning bugs for tonight. In a minute, Geoff will bring his catch to us.

I still laugh when I think of him and his brother Stephen sitting in your car waiting for you. You heard him turn with some of those mischievous giggles to Stephen and say, “This will really scare Mommaw,” as he clicked on the car radio as loud as it would go, turned on the blinkers and all the car lights, and then sat still as a mouse waiting for you to start the car and act surprised.

You said it reminded you of Gran; he used to do the same thing to Paul Steele’s car as the two of you walked into church on Sunday. Paul Steele always knew it was Gran, but it didn’t stop Gran’s unchecked glee at being able to play the joke.

Here comes Geoff now, cheeks flushed with excitement. As he puts his little hand in yours, I can’t help but notice the ease with which you caress his soft cheek. Gone for a moment are the lingering ravages of the arthritis.

We laugh together as we congratulate him on his find. Listen. The katydids are beginning to hum as the night sneaks in on us. Remember when Gran used to say that “everything is copacetic”? That’s how I feel on nights like this: everything is very satisfactory.

I still recall the first day back when we moved home from Texas. Even though, we had made the decision to come home, it didn’t ease the despair with which we viewed your old house. It had been sitting empty for a year, and the musty smell and dirty walls weren’t part of the good times that I can remember about being there. As we ripped up the worn carpet and took down the ancient drapes, I could feel your heart tearing as though we had violated sacred ground.

One day, when I came home unexpectedly from school, you were sitting there alone in the recliner. When I uneasily asked you what was wrong, you told me that you had been sitting there since morning, and having strongly sensed Gran’s presence, you dared not move. At that moment, I saw the devastation of the grief and felt the enormity of the hurt, but comforting words escaped me. You had always been so strong; You could hear the loneliness.

The days are growing longer, and soon we’ll be sitting on the porch sipping iced tea, trying to forget the sweltering heat of the afternoon. At night, the entire family will gather together and sit outside under the stars, sometimes just to be hypnotized by the brilliance of the heavens, but mostly to feel the closeness of spending a moment together.

Tonight, the children play, “Remember When”…remember when we would all get up in Gran’s chair with him, all six of us at the same time? As we grow silent with our own memories, we again hear the soothing whine of the katydids, and frogs croaking in the pond across the field.

Excitedly, we look for our favorite constellations and you tell us that when Alan was a little boy, the family would look for the Sputnik. In the peace of the darkness, Alan tells us that if you look really closely at the stars, they will grow brighter and brighter, and Geoff, because he’s the youngest adds, “And they’ll get closer too.”

We all laugh but I sense that our memories are indeed like tonight’s stars. If you carry them tightly in your heart and look really closely, they will grow brighter and brighter, and if you keep looking, they’ll be so near at hand that you feel only warmth and no loss.