Dancing memories and pressed flowers
When preparing the moving, the second room that I worked on was the “girl's room”, in the closet there were just outdated clothes that were going to be thrown away, I went through that fairly quickly. However, in that room the treasure chest was in the dresser, in the bottom drawers where my mom kept her stuff, the kind of stuff that was totally “off limits”. That was almost a historic occasion, I got to peek in my mom's stuff without being interrupted or stopped! Opening the drawer, and opening my mom's missal was like opening a music box. My mom's memories were not dusty and popped up dancing, like when my mom was a little girl who was going for a drive with her parents, on a Sunday afternoon after going to mass, her veil still on.
She loved those drives because they always would go to the country and stop in a nice field to have a picnic, she could run, and dance, and play, and pick flowers with her brother and her sisters for her mom. As I closed the book, the memories lay flat on the pages of the old missal like a pressed flower and they smelled like my mom, like the perfume she saved for the “special occasions” that never happened. The bottle had gone dry but still kept the smell, and that was enough to take me away to when I was listening to my mom's stories as she organized the stuff in the drawers, I'd sit next to her to be able to see all her tings, the shawls, the missal, her fancy silk veils, love letters, pictures, and her stories. Her memories and my imagination dancing together like little girls in a field. Suddenly I hear the door open and my dad saying “I'm here”, that startled me so much that I almost jumped to the roof. I was so lost, delighted and feeling the rush caused by the secrecy of the situation that I felt the same guilt that I did when, as a child, I was caught snooping around.
After apologizing for being late, he checked the boxes and said “good job! They are already labeled. I'll tape and tie them up, so that they don't come undone. If you're done here, go to the kitchen and pack pots and pans, I brought lots of newspaper to wrap the dinnerware and the glassware with”.
I got up to do as I was told, again back to being 6, when for the first time that day I took a look around and noticed something strange, everything looked so small, it was as if the whole place had suddenly shrunk, or I'd become a giant. Absently, I said it out loud and my dad gave me an understanding look as if he had read my mind and said “things didn't shrink, we grew old”. Worried, I went back to packing stuff, wondering how was I going to pack my memories back, what kind of tape and string would it take to hold them together. I didn't want them to evaporate like the perfume or get lost in a field or shrink and disappear in my brain.
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