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Memoir depends upon memories, yet memory is a living thing—a slippery, unreliable thing.
In her book The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr describes memory as "a pinball in a machine—it messily ricochets around between image, idea, fragments of scenes, stories you’ve heard. Then the machine goes tilt and snaps off" (Karr 1).
How can we trust this tilting machine to deliver something whole and wholly reliable? If we want to incorporate even short memories into our work to serve as illustrations, Karr says, “even the best minds warp and blur what they see…For all of memory’s power to yank us back into an overwhelming past, it can also fail big time” (5). She sends copies of her manuscripts to people who appear in her books because she doesn’t trust her “wiggly mind” (5).
This week is my grandmother's birthday. If she were alive, we'd be celebrating her 121st birthday. And when her birthday comes around, even though she’s been gone for decades, I still remember the coo of mourning doves in her small Midwestern town, and the sensation of walking on cool linoleum in her kitchen, and the taste of soft sugar cookies with gumdrops pressed in the center.
My parents would drop me off to spend a week with her in the summertime, and I loved sleeping in the front bedroom under fresh sheets spread taut and tidy over the big double bed with its high and regal ornate wood-carved headboard—part of a set she’d inherited from a cousin. Grandma would fold a loosely woven “summer weight” blanket over the sheets, and for a long time I felt like the best of summer was somehow linked to that pastel blanket.
In the narrow, horizontal window of that bedroom, she displayed a collection of colored glass bottles. Light streamed through the blues, yellows, pinks, purples, and greens—morning magic. I blinked myself awake, rested and safe.
In my memory I can still walk through every room, from the baker's cabinet in the corner of the kitchen to the daybed along the dining room wall; from the collection of gardening books on shelves in the living room, to the glass jar of leftover yarn balls sitting next to a chair in Grandma's bedroom.
I wander out the screen door and hear the squeaky stretch of the spring that pulls the wooden frame shut behind me with a solid "thunk." Under the grape arbor, I pluck a Concord grape, manipulating the skin off with my teeth to suck the sweet, cool insides and chew the sour skin for a few seconds before spitting it out.
In my mind, baby's breath still blooms white behind the garage and orange daylilies line the side of the house. My grandma made rag rugs on a loom set up on a small porch. I can see its threads and recall how she’d slide the shuttle across the strings and pull the long wooden beater forward to bind the strips of cloth snug and firm, her feet pressing pedals as the strings shifted to weave.
When Grandma passed away in 1987, the house was sold, remodeled, and turned into a rental after the possessions were divided among my mom, uncles, cousins, brother, and me. Though the structure remained, the home as I knew and loved it had been gone since I was young.
Why, then, did it hurt so much to hear from my mom that the house burned down in 2010?
It sat derelict for months. My mom and dad drove to visit the cemetery on Memorial Day a year later. Mom snapped a photo of the beloved house, her childhood home, and sent it to me.
At first, I couldn’t bear to see the house like that—one glance at the scorched brick and I grieved my grandmother and that space all over again.
Then I forced myself to look, to remember.
I stared at the snapshot for a long time. Weeds grew tall and gangly and the grass was high and uncut. But next to the porch where the loom once sat,
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