Well there's always the theory the child lives up to--or lives down--the name.

Sorry for being so pokey today. However!

Challenge #2 is now closed.

(For future reference, all challenges will be saved in the "Memories" section of the LJ community.)

This week's challenge comes from Deb. The theme is "memory." BUT! What I want you to drabble about isn't necessarily the memory itself, but rather, about whatever it is that evokes the memory. Proust's petite madeleine that brought forth a deluge of memories. The way the light hits the floor at a certain time of year makes you remember the summer you broke your leg and had to stay inside, which is when you read all the LOTR books, including the Silmarillon.

Tie the memory together with what evokes it. And drabble, drabble, drabble!

(Deb, if I didn't describe it correctly, PLEASE tell me, so I can amend.)

Damn, woman, you left me a head-scratcher.

Susan, Benedick. It's pompous, and it's got "dick" biult right in. Modern readers will catch that, if subconsciously -- "Benedick is a bit of a dick."

But I'm immature.

I'm trying to think of memories to. Imay just have to cruise tonight until one hits me.

Maybe not.

Some people don't have LJ, and I'm egotistical enough to share.

They open the door to the cellar of the centuries-old boarding house in Philadelphia. I close my eyes and breathe deeply. Cold, damp, sharp, earthy. My guide shivers: "I hate that smell."

But I'm back fifteen years, at the other end of Pennsylvania, in the stone-floored cellar of the house I grew up in. Canning jars from an unknown decade sit on stone shelves, draped in cobwebs. The spiders have a pedigree as long as my own in these hills. The dogs follow me down and snuffle in the corners.

I take another deep breath. "Smells like home."

First one, not guts-having enough to post it to LJ.

Phantom limbs.

Maybe this is what it's like. Turn a corner, see a mother with a babe of no more than two, three weeks. If that. So young he or she still curls through instinct like a pillbug or an armadillo, limbs drawn up and in to protect itself against the world. Phantom tugs. Feel the warmth and weight, the unfocused squirm, all of it.

Sweet sweat smell. Looking into alien eyes, too wide, too dark, too old, too new. Needy. Unfocused. All seeing.

Phantom lives.

There. Not there. Real. Not real. Personal shrapnel. Unhealed wounds.

Loss and longing, intertwined.

It's great, Plei. You should post it in lj.

Here follows the not-drabble that came out of last week's challenge. Sorry for the cross-post if you've read it. I'm feeling brave at the moment, and may rescind it should my courage fail later.

kona.

A blast of air comes through the louvered windows, plumeria and earth and only faintly salty. It rattles the thin walls – no insulation, because we don’t really need it here. Out the picture window, the lush green of the trees down the mountainside, lit by the flare of the setting sun. Then Kailua Bay, I can see the red top of the tourist glass-bottomed boat even from this distance. The harbor lights just coming on, starting to sparkle with nightlife. Here, the chickens call to each other instead. And then the ocean, with its flat flat line of horizon separating the blue of the evening sky from the blue of the sea. A blaze of colors in the clouds bids me goodnight.

Inside, it is an amalgam of the past and present. My grandmother’s things. Some are still here. Some are more present by their absence. The old couch is here, the same blue green as when I played as a child, the springs where she sat more worn now than they were the last time I was here. Her shelf of treasures, mostly our pictures, frozen in various awkward stages of growth. Tiny handmade gifts we’ve long forgotten, but she never did. But the obutsudan is missing, given away, after some controversy, to my cousin. No ancient picture of my grandfather on its little shelf. No little shrine with its rice and incense; gifts to the dead.

I will get the tiger picture that she embroidered. My parents don’t seem to see a place for it in their planned décor. But it will fit nicely in my writing room. Huge and Japanese and so intensely personal and impersonal simultaneously. She labored over it for so long that the paint-by-numbers aspect of the design was gone. Her zabuton are here, but not her futons, those I lost in my irresponsibility. My mother will soon exhume all the treasures, neatly inventoried when my grandmother went blind. “This is from your aunt. This was your grandfather’s lunch box. You put rice in this section, ume in this section, and if you had meat you put it here, chopsticks there. And this was your mother’s lunch box, when your mother was a child. Here are your grandmother’s coffee clothes, her apron, her hat, her gloves.”

We will go through each item. Musty clothing. Costume jewelry, still intricate and lovely with sharp edges. I will take her little brush. For practical reasons, but also because I need to have something to hold on to besides memory. We will fold her muumuus and put them away. Some things to keep. Some things to give away. Some things to discard. What is left of our lives when we are gone.

Later, after the memorial service (my parents will go up to the altar and give incense, but I will not, instead I will give the eulogy) we will go holoholo and take a holiday. We will drive around the island and play. “This is the stream your father fished when he was a boy. Here is where his house stood in the sugar cane plantation. This is the railroad bridge your grandmother took as a shortcut to school. When the trains came, they hung from their fingertips over the side of the bridge until they passed. Here is where your grandmother’s first house stood. This is where you can get the best malasadas.” It will be a relief to be together and to be family and to be free from caregiving. I will feel guilty about this, but the relief will overshadow the guilt.

And I will soon fly away from it all. Back to the desert. Back to the children I love whose lives are so messed up. Back to the safety and familiarity of my husband and van and routine and instruments. Back to the present. And my parents will soon retire here. Make it their own. The old couch will go. My husband’s photos will go up where the tiger is. They will don their own coffee clothes and go out into the land, prune the trees, clear away the ages worth of brush. They will come home.

But for now, I stand and watch the sun disappear into the sea. Will its fires be doused by the ocean forever? Will it ever rise over the mountain? But I can still see its color reflected in the clouds for a long, long time, maybe forever. And I can still see my grandmother reflected in her land, her legendary pineapples, the coffee trees she planted, the house my grandfather built, the road they cleared. And in my mother’s face, suffused with light, for a long, long time, maybe forever.

And this week's drabble.

breath.

I watched her die.

When I thought back, I assumed I’d just noticed later, after the fact. But I think I realize I was watching, and she died.

What I noticed was that she stopped breathing. That’s what I told the nurses. She’s not breathing. As though maybe that didn’t mean she was dead.

But how do you notice the absence of something? It’s not an action. It’s the long pause between when it should have come and when it didn’t. Doesn’t. Ever again.

So now I count breaths. I am afraid. Terrified. When the dog pauses between breath, sleeping. Or when my husband does.

Because the absence is that frail pause between is and isn’t.

Gorgeous, liese, both of them.

My husband will go as long as seven seconds between breaths when he's sleeping. Yes, I've timed it.