Some of the things I’ve kept from your home, mama. I know you’d be sad no one wanted the china or silver. No one took all the Hummels. No one wanted the antiques or the clocks. We even left behind the new bed. But here is some of what I kept:
Don’t laugh, mama, but I kept the brown glass jar that you stored the cotton swabs in. How could I not? They’ve been there since forever and whenever I come down, I refill it for you and use them.
My set of Little House on the Prairie books. Or were they yours? Either way, they are taped together and I want them.
A brown purse in the back of your hall closet I discovered just two days ago. When I saw it, I had a flash of you carrying it and me looking up to hold your hand and seeing that purse dangling from your shoulder.
Yes, don’t worry, I took all your recipe binders, neatly organized by type: desserts, cookies, bars, side dishes, appetizers, casseroles, chicken dishes, all the rest. Even though half my kids don’t eat meat and I don’t buy cream of this or that, I will read them all and try many of them from my childhood. Maybe I’ll just sit at the table by myself with a fork eating the chicken tortilla casserole out of the dish.
All I could take were three cactus arrangements. I’m sorry. I wanted all your outdoor tropical plants but they’ll die in the north and I’d need a U-Haul to bring them all home. Impossible to keep them alive. When each one died, I’d relive your death all over again. And the guilt would for sure overcome me. I’m sorry.
The night before I left, I found the manila envelope with every single Christmas letter you wrote dating back to 1965. I panicked that I missed something else. How did I not see those before? And yes, I understand the gap between 1973 and 1981 or 2. I bet those years were impossibly hard to write letters after daddy died. I get it. My Christmas letters altogether stopped after Grace died. What was I going to say anyways? Here are our children except Grace. Do you see the gap I will always see? The space between #2 and #4? Therein lies a portion of my grief: the air between 2 and 3. The beauty in all of them. Would she be more like 1 or 4? My words and letters always seemed empty after she died. But then I felt empty for years. How could I not?
I’m sorry I couldn’t take it all, mama. But you knew that. You knew none of us would take 1/10th of what you so carefully stored and dusted and used at all of the holidays.
But don’t worry, I have this:
I just need to close my eyes and I can see you standing in the kitchen stirring the pot of soup. Hand me the salt, you’d say or Take the cream cheese out of the fridge to soften, before I blend it with the powdered sugar.
In my mind, I still see it all. The last breathe. The screams back and forth in my teenage years. The hug each time I drove away or flew away. The look in your eyes when I asked for more this or that: I always wanted more than you could give, your German North Dakota stoicism preventing you from giving too much of anything: hugs or gifts or stories.
My needs will always be voracious.
If you can forgive me, I also forgive you.
No matter. Here we both are now. Me still living and breathing in the air you also breathed.
And you still looming larger than life in my mind.