Snowdrops!

At least I think that's what they're called. I can't remember planting them this fall and I don't remember them blooming here before, which is odd because I'm pretty ocd about the flowers in the woods. I've been trying to reestablish the oak-hickory understory so it can support wildflowers and a few cultivated pretties for over a decade. It's an epic battle against brambles, vines and buckthorns, marauding raccoons and deer. It requires burning now and then, which I hate, so I've only done it twice. I take pictures every year, to help me remember what blooms where and when and I don't have one of this beauty, so it must be new. I will quit trying to figure it out and accept that my memory is on a long vacation and just enjoy this happy surprise in the woods. And maybe plant some more, because they are awesome.

Untethered

Memory
fails for the mundane
names of ordinary simple things
elude:
refrigerator garage cabinet
only an image presents itself
the word hides
sticks
lost

Where is my...
Where did I leave...
What did he say...
What day did we....
When did we last....

There is nothing there
nobody home
empty space
floats freely
between failed connections

What is this?
I have no idea
but I am afraid.

What has become of my memory
What is happening to my mind
Where did I go and
Where will this lead?

I have no idea
none at all.
Nothing.

Think. Try harder.
Look for a back door
and open window
a way in
a way back
to me
and
the words.

This Painting

My Grandmother painted this landscape on the back of an old metal sign. She was a beautiful woman, calm and loving and intelligent and talented. She sewed, embroidered, tatted, cooked, worked the farm and the animals, wrote beautiful letters...
and she painted.

She died at 63, after suffering several years of increasingly debilitating dementia, called Picks Disease, similar to Alzheimer's. It was horrifying and indescribable to watch as a child. It will probably be the last thing I forget about her.

This painting haunts me now, because it was a scene from her life and yet not, as the hills and foreboding came from what she saw in her mind; the trees and sheds from the back yard. The mountainous clouds seem to me an omen of something looming out there, unstoppable and unwelcome. I remember her both happy and whole, as well as fractured and frightful. I remember how unspeakably the cloud of her illness and the sheer loss of her covered our family. I wonder how it feels to someone unattached, untorn by the incompatible memories of the woman who inhabited this landscape.

There is no date on the painting, and I'm not sure if she painted it as a young woman before her mind fell apart, or once she began to sense herself slipping away. She was said to have the sight, as her mother before her and my mother before me. I have no such premonitions from beyond of things to come, as my ghosts come only from the past, with not even a hint of what's next, just what's likely, which is burden enough for me to bear.

I remember perfectly the look on her face the last time I tried to talk to her, to connect with the grandmother I adored, who adored me, as she careened wildly from giddy happiness, childish glee and silliness to confusion, anger and fear, when came suddenly that jolt of clarity, when she looked into my eyes deeply and I understood. My child's mind and memory are certain that she knew, that for a fleeting moment she was aware exactly what had happend to her; she surfaced for air only to know that she was drowning, slipping away into the labrynth of her mind. It is that moment of sentience, for both of us, that haunts me when I look at this painting. It would have been easier to lose her all at once,completely, and forever, than to have her look at me with those furious, desperate and infinitely sad eyes and have no comfort to give. To need comfort that could not be given.

It becalms me to look at this picture, of her before, and how she saw her life and her farm in happier times.

Frances Angelene Campbell Hickman

Beverly Farm, Maryland