Fading Memories

My Mother is 76 years old. She is the last of any of my family, save my Father from whom I am estranged. Mom's mother died at 99 2/3 yrs. All of the ladies in my family, on both sides, lived to similarly long ages.

But I was far too young when most of them were in good health to understand or appreciate their memories and their lives.

Mother periodically pipes up with an anecdote that I have never heard. I beg her to write them down. Every day to sit with her notebook and let the memories come, let them prompt other memories, and to record them for me.

She never does and I despair. I know that so much of my maternal familial history will die with her. My youngest brother is mentally retarded and my other brother strives to distance himself from every aspect of my family.

My father's family, equally as long-lived, and as multi-facted and intriguing, all died long ago.

My great, great, great Aunt Maude, whom I met at the age of 100 (when I was five), died at 103 in 1963. She had lived during the Civil War and I had sat on her lap. I own one of the paintings she did and I bemoan the loss of all of her belongings and paintings, even her ivory hair pins which, with floor-length hair, she was in dire need of. I knew an elderly, fragile woman in a wheel chair, which she was forced into after her second fall down the stairs and double broken hips.

My great aunt Gertrude - too "nervous" to hold a job though she was trained as a teacher, lived in a rambling house in Vermont, watching the Yankees play, making fairly dreadful food, reading Mickey Spillane novels while smoking Camels and sipping Jack Daniels. I remember her long, thin, greying hair, her braying laugh, and twinkling eyes. And the sweet smell of her as she snuggled me into bed with her when I was a child and staying with her in Poultney.

Her sister, with whom she had a classic love hate relationship was my Great Aunt Mildred. Mimi, as we called her, was a broad woman with tight, curling hair (the opposite of her sister's straight long locks), fluttery hands, plenty of money and a weird thing about cats. Her home in Whitehall, NY reeked of cat urine, great old dark dramatic paintings of boar hunts, and huge chests with mysterious contents and scary snake skins hanging in the attic. Her back yard, a myriad of flowers and herbs and an abandoned feeling was filled with feral cats. Whenever she could catch a pregnant female cat she would keep it until it had its kittens and then have all the animals put to sleep so they wouldn't suffer a "wild" existence. She had a friend, Helen, whom I later (much later) realized was the euphemistic "companion" and the two ladies lived for decades together in a connected house. I still recall the musty smell and the deserted view of the house with its empty porch and hollow, vacant looking windows.

My great aunts, Stella and Ruth, were my Grandmother Horton's sisters. Stella had been engaged when her fiance drowned and Ruth had been married to a young gay man. Both ladies were single, solitary and set in their ways when I knew them.

I was told of their deaths far after the fact. Estranged families are like that.

Homes were sold, belongings destroyed or thrown away, and I still lament the fact that these odd, fun, curious and loving women are gone from my life, and their memories gone as well. They live only in my memory and I wish I could have known more of what they thought, felt, hoped and dreamed.

I beg my Mother to record her memories. All those elusive ones that pop into her conciousness and will, in all likelihood, never reappear, though others no doubt will.

As a writer I crave these memories. To tell me what the world before my time was like. How women were, how they loved, lived ... and how they died. I love to pull from my life for my work. Whether I am writing fiction, or whether I am preparing my own memoir (under the various titles, "My Granfather's Hands" or "Wonder Bread Dreams" - my current favorite), there is nothing that so invests my writing as the knowledge of what those who have gone before me have been like.

Mom? Do me a favor ... pick up that pen and WRITE!