Misty, Watercolor Memories

There’s no accounting for memories.

That’s what popped into my head as I was reading a story in Jim Ray Daniel’s new collection Eight Mile High. Teenage boys in the ’60s, hanging out, pawing a stolen issue of Playboy magazine. All of a sudden I remembered being with my West Virginia childhood girlfriend Debbie in her house, up on a step stool, peering into a cupboard over the closet in her parents’ bedroom. She’d wanted to show me her discovery: Her dad’s stack of Playboys, which sent us into a gusher of titters like the typical innocent seven-year-olds we were. The town’s preeminent dentist of all people. Into girlie mags. WTF?

And so the thought occurred to me: There’s no accounting for memories. You just have to take the oddball zingers with the predictable zappers, sunsets on Lake Ontario, for example. Or lean into the curve of the imagination via the above image of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Mountain Road,”and let it take you to New Mexican landscapes.

Now I’m sitting at my desk in the library I wrote about in my last post, burning some not-quite midnight oil wondering what memories will pop into my head years from now, ones about this house. Will I remember the porn flicks stashed in our soon-to-be-cleared-out garage storage loft. Ones Roger and I used to watch now destined for the trash come Saturday when my friends Mark and Colleen are here, helping us to clear out all that junk stashed overhead?

Will I remember our day of camaraderie at some point in the distant future when I’ve been dozing in my easy chair, feet up, having had a full-blown crone’s afternoon snooze?

I hope so. That’s a day I want to remember years from now.  Hence, a poetic mnemonic device:

Preparing for M Day

enemy house of mine

I speak in the short term in terms

of conquering your loft space

behind the plywood door

seven stealthy ladder steps up

where your forces have amassed detritus

over the dusty long term     

I use the term deploy

marshaling my own troupes

two friends     one long-term

another becoming thus 

I employ two terms in one phrase:

I wage war

on the storage area

above your garage

where for twenty-six years

godknowswhat lurks

a catchall term I coin for: 

plastic port-a-potty (long-term)

VHS porno tapes

humpback trunk stuffed

with old bedding

and twelve-by-twelve tent (short-term)

Barbie dolls in their Barbie wardrobe

my marketing-career portfolio

and a dozen or more originally packaged boxes

of West Virginia Specialty Glass Company

hand-blown stemware     pitchers      salad plates

tumblers     a candy dish or two (very long-term)

My army will rout it all out 

What match are memories sealed and labeled

for a domestic Sun Tzu

preparing for M Day

with her loyal lieutenants

Block and Powderly

and husband Weir bringing up

the rear according to strategic maneuvers

body-bagged junk to the curb

donations to the car

prisoners of my hoarded memories

to the southeast corner by the door 

At the end of the day’s battle

I will be able to say

in no uncertain terms

I love you     my enemy     my house 

***

Getting back to that business of goofy memories that can pop up at the oddest times. There’s always the possibility that I will also recall astonishment – the astonishment of Dewey, the septic system man, who had never heard this one before: in the 26 years that I’ve lived here, 19 of them with my Roger, we have never had our tank pumped.  Twenty-six years, no problem. No apparent need to call in a professional shit-sucker. Not broken, don’t fix. But, New York State Law requires sellers to empty the pot and have it certified functional. He’s coming tomorrow to get the stink out.  It’ll be a once-in-a-lifetime event for me. I must remember to take pictures.  (And sprinkle a little bit of my brother’s bone dust into the slurry.)

*** 

We have gone away from here many, many times but this house has for so very long been the home we come home to, as we did in June, returning from our two weeks in Taos, happy to have been in our little home-away-from-home at Casa Encantada, and to have had the privilege to walk among the old adobe homes of Taos Pueblo. Two weeks of warm, bright days and cool nights in our love nest in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, in a sage desert along the gorge of the Rio Grande. O’Keeffe country.  Lawrence country. Our country for many years now, a dozen or more trips west to northern New Mexico and home again. So many years we have brought memories of Taos back with us in our hearts to live with us by the lake in our home-home.

I realize tonight also that this will also be the home we return to from our forthcoming adventure to Scotland, Paris, and Germany’s Black Forest, departing July 26 for 18 days 14. Our first time in Europe together.  A welcomed vacation from sorting, packing, hauling. But a sobering thought occurs to me: this will be the last time we return from a journey to our lake home. Big sigh.

If you want to follow the Scotland portion of our adventure, go to Lindblad Expeditions’ Highlands Cruise on the Lord of the Glen: http://www.expeditions.com/destinations/scotland/ There’s a link on the page to “Daily Expedition Reports.” The crew will be posting those during our adventure, July 29-August 9.

Meanwhile, thank you for being with me at home and abroad these past seven years. The saga will continue at the same desk on the same laptop if from a different library, a new home where you can join me, I would hope, in setting down stakes. Meanwhile, this post will serve as a memory booster of the time I last spoke to you from Edrose Shores. Au revoir.

***  

Finally, as usual, I leave you good people the opportunity to do some further reading if you’re so inclined:

·         You might get a chuckle out of my poem in the new issue of The Homestead Review; thanks to editor Jennifer Felluth for publishing “Imagine a Holy-Roller Hyphen Revival First-Hand.” Go to: http://www.hartnell.edu/homestead_review/Spring_2014/merrifield.pdf

·         I was tickled pink that editor Nathan Hondros at Regime Magazine in Australia gave the light of day to “Aubade in Nine Amphribrachs.” It’s from my collection When the Night Is Slow: Poems après Leonard Cohen, now off being eyeballed by a publisher. Find my Regime poem at: http://www.regimebooks.com.au/regime04/

·         My thanks to Roberta Hill, editor, and Michael McDermott, editor/publisher at About Place Journal. The new issue, “Enlightened Visions in the Wake of Trauma” is a breathtaking, passionate call to action on behalf of our home planet. You’ll find my poem at http://aboutplacejournal.org/enlightened-visions/s3-iii-i/Karla-Merrifield-iii-i/