#26 In Which Someone Fails To Move Something Too Heavy

“Mom, it’s me. Can you hear me?” 

Her son kneels next to her, not sure if she is alive or dead with the detritus spread around her, buffering her fall and probably saved her life.

“Mom, it’s me.”

She was on the kitchen floor like a sick, helpless thing whom hadn’t anything to eat or drink for perhaps three days.

Her silvery white hair twisted and matted with blood.

Check her pulse, her breathing for consciousness.

Wipe the dirt off her and the mucus away from her lips.

She looks up at you with her bright blue eyes, and her bruised face and doesn’t say anything until EMS arrives and further untangles her.

You open many doors when cleaning out the old little house you grew up in (after she was put into a memory care facility). Finding things you never knew existed and not just because she was a hoarder and burrowed layer upon layer of newspaper, memorabilia: valuable and useless tucked away like a busy squirrel always on the verge of lifetime hibernation. You find out that this house was her dying tree, (the kind that you hire experts to chop off limbs to save the tree) or the brittle roots beneath the decaying Maple that tenuously held everything together for years. Flash card memories and connections stored in every shred of paper, photograph, article of clothing she could not part with, especially after dad died.  It was her existence wedged between herself and the outside world.  Her foundation and destruction all wrapped up into one dusty, dirty mice infested ball.

You saved her life. Did you?

All the jarring anguish which proceeded this, eons ago, was swept under the disorderly mess and steadily disintegrated under the floorboards. Tiny particles drifted out the crack in the stained glass window and grabbed hold of a robins' wing and you escaped and never looked back. Not even with her in a damp, sweaty heap in front of you on the floor. You are a bit like a bear and move into survival mode with your strong furry paws, gentle eyes, soft arms and grizzly-brained movement. Always forward, always. Never looking back.  You picked up the squirrel who saved so much debris infused with her fierce determination:

to be found by

her husband,

her mother or father, (both abandoned her) or just

someone to discover that she really existed inside all this stuff?

You pull her hair away from her face and, again, gently ask,

“Mom, can you hear me?”

I had a dream we were walking through the house and discovered closed doors. We open them, soft sunlight eeked in and there were toys everywhere. Disneyland castles, Peter Pan, Tinkerbelle, The Lost Boys, Wendy, The Seven Dwarves, plastic monuments piled up but with some semblance of order. Like when kids set up a dollhouse and it looks messy but it all has meaning, located purposefully. Each doll has a personal narrative and relationship to the others. They aren’t alone and have not been for at least 60 years.

They are smiling tucked in rows next to each other, snuggled under a colorful hand stitched cotton quilt in a baby’s wooden cradle. Never growing old, just existing in pink kodachrome Disney.