We’re tethered to the world by who we
love. Whether a person, an animal or a place, this is how we belong to the
world and how we know how to be in it.
This is how gravity works, not as a unified force, but through people,
places or animals. Or other lives that
we live. Otherwise, we’d just float off into the cold, distant night.
~
Mrs. Scattergood smoothed things out. She polished wood. She stirred the boiling to a slow simmer. She
made nicey nice and didn’t always leave the right picture of reality. But this smoothed out thing happens and
that’s a reality on its own. Could be
that in the smoothed out world you can find the dimension of the large and
heroic. That world of fable and figures from myth that stand larger than people
ever could. Where they’re more noble and funnier too if you get the right
person to tell their stories. Baubo loved a good story. She told Mrs.
Scattergood that she thought of memory as a hive. Each story is a part of a
world. Often an unexpected event will call up a story. In the last few years
Mrs. Scattergood would try to hold onto the tenuous connection she had to a
cloud shape or a character's notions about the world. But they are as flimsy as a drop of water on
a dry hot day. Everything evaporates.
But a fascination with memory and wanting to hold onto those little moments
tolerates that sometimes parallel track of futility. Her fascination with
timelines and history graphs catered to this part of her life. If it wasn’t
eras that she tried to memorize, it was dates and centuries, which, frankly,
make eras seem as far away as the rings of Saturn.
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