Script

You will collect them.

One day.

I hope one day far from this day.

And you’ll marvel that you ever rolled your eyes and wonder what was so silly about it

because now?

Well.

In her careful hand she wished me happy birthdays and merry Chirstmases, but even happy Halloweens and Happy St. Patrick’s days and the occasional card just to say she missed me. A news clipping, detailing the lot of some former classmate, the fate thrust upon an old building in the neighborhood, that someone had died.

I hold all of these now and stare at the way she wrote my name and remember that she chose it and that means that she loved it, and that my father, gone eighteen years before her, loved it too, and there was a moment when they both said “that’s it!” and named me.

I look at her careful handwriting and remember the notes she sent to school with me after I’d been absent for with a stomach ache, detailing the mundane for Ms. So-and-So on fine stationery. She wasn’t a writer, I was, and my dad was, but not she, she always said. But for someone who did not write, her words were so beautiful.

I know now that, of course, somewhere inside of my unknowing, untested 20-something mind, I knew that these things were important because they were still mine. They were shoved into shoe boxes and drawers and not discarded.

The strange glow of her death, those couple of days before she was in the earth, I had to do what I’d seen her do many times. I made the phone calls. “Hi, this is Mary-Margaret and we haven’t spoken/barely know you/repeat my name, but you knew my mom and she’s dead now.” My reference was her address book, and her careful print in my lap was somehow grounding as the rest of the universe whirled around me.

Her recipe cards that are kept not because she was a good cook because she wasn’t, but because they are in her hand. Because she sent them with me when I moved out. Because they are her, still feeding me, all these years later.

Letters she wrote to my father over the long-distance courtship not because I want to know details of their intimacy but because she meant every slide of pen to paper and because she was charting a roadmap to me, and the rest of forever, and here I am at a destination I have yet to explore, and not sure if I will be able to understand. But the key is forged in characters that are all at once marshmallows toasted in a Vermont fireplace, Gregorian chants hummed as stained glass sunrays rested on her cheek, the morning my father died and the night I shouted that I did not like her second husband. They are fraught and confused, and pleasant and warm, but most of all they are known, they are known.