I cleaned my walls with one of those “magic erasers” that disappears as it swipes my home of fingerprints and crayon marks. Some people mark their child’s passage of time with slash marks on a doorjamb, measurements of height and age and parenting.
I mark ours with grayed tracks across the white baseboards, pencil dashes made out of turn, how far I have to reach up to make the frame white again.
Erasing filth – and moments of their childhood.
Despite the technology of today, my ability to take a picture of any moment does not mean I’m documenting better than my mother did. Definitely not better than my grandmother who wrote letters in a spidery script, long ones with more details than my latest Instagram post.
These letters are the windows into my mother’s childhood, stamped indelibly beyond the reach of a magic eraser. The house where she left smudges on the walls, where her mother draped cloth diapers to dry when the rain kept them from the line, where she set the table with china bought piece by piece, no longer exists. But the letters remain.
They tell a story about my grandmother’s motherhood that is both the same and different from mine. A paragraph chronicling my mother’s first steps makes me wonder if I can remember those of my eldest daughter. I have to sift through the fog of that time, when I had one barely toddling while another one grew inside, making me a mother of two long before I figured out how to be a mother of one. My grandmother knew that struggle too. And like me, she took her solace in sharing stories with her own mama.
These letters came to my mother when they cleaned out the brick ranch house I remember, though it was not the house in which she grew up. In this house, there would have been no fingerprints left on walls.
I remember a pristine parlor and a garden with a bit of wildness. Boiled peanuts and the sound of Braves baseball and sepia toned photographs. But no moments of childhood on display. These letters and the scallop-edged pictures are what my mama has to remember the days when she was little, days which must seem both so long ago and yet so near.
That feeling I know well as I clean the walls and scroll Google photos to prepare a senior yearbook page. How quickly the time passes, and how little of it we still possess. I wish I had taken the time to write more letters, scrawl more entries in the baby book, actually print and label and make albums of all the pictures.
There are so many, just tiny everyday moments. Nothing special or big or particularly memorable, but these are the ones that matter most. These are the days that made it into my grandmother’s letters. These are the times I’m erasing away.
Thank goodness there’s still time to create a story which lasts.
Lindsey P. Brackett is a community columnist who writes books and makes pizza. Find her novel, “The Bridge Between,” anywhere books are sold. Get a free novella at lindseypbrackett.com.