This text was written as I learn to live with Long Covid and attempt to regain my creativity. All the posts and some more info can be found here.
My mother unzips the many bags she has carried with her to my brother's flat. She sits on the sofa. We surround the bags, cross legged on the carpet, eyes peering through the fabric openings. The cat lingers on the window, oblivious to our movements.
The bags are full of treasures past gathered through the years and somewhat forgotten. Bundles of wool line the edges. They are for me to learn to weave. Some of the wool belonged to my grand mother, some to my mother, all of them over ten years old at this stage. In the centre is an old suitcase filled with the last of my grand mother's jewellery. Mostly these are broken pieces she never bothered to fix. None of it is gold. All of that has been melted to transform into cash. My mother and my aunt have kept the stones to shape them anew in jewellery for them.
Another bag holds games, letters and postcards I dispatched from the UK and wherever I travelled across Europe in the last two decades. My grandmother has compiled them all in one pink folder labelled with my name in her neat round cursive handwriting. There are notebooks too, but these are in my mom's small pointy handwriting. Alongside are teacher's paperwork with grades and comments from her school days.
More box lay within boxes withing bags. We take each of them out in turn and remember faded memories, stories told so many times I cannot distinguish them from truth and fiction. Everything holds a story, even when the objects appear meaningless to me. I am drawn to the thin gold wedding band of the great grand mother I have never known. She died long before my parents met and yet, I want this ring, this object that belonged to the grand mother that taught my mother to cook crêpes by eye. She was my grand father's mother, my mother's safe haven as she grew up. I slide it on a finger. It fits. I keep it.
Tucked in the corner of another suitcase is an old Rummikub game. This one I was expecting. I asked for it. It is a game my grand parents wanted. My grand father sent my grand mother on an errand to purchase it. It was so expensive at the time, she had to call him from a telephone booth to check he was okay spending such money on something so trivial. He was okay it. The brown plastic box that holds the tiles is heavy. The white tiles have faded a little to yellow over the years, but the painted numbers are still clear in their pastel paint. This is a game I played over and over with my grand mother. She'd sit with me of an evening when I was a child and have a game or two before sending me to bed and returning to the kitchen. As I grew into adulthood, I learned the patience of dragging her away from the kitchen, of getting her to sit down and play. If I was lucky, she'd relax just enough to share stories of her past. I grab the game and place it next to my suitcase. My mother and brother do not share these memories. These are mine and mine alone and I want to keep them locked in the game for a while longer.
Before I arrived on the evening train, my mother had unloaded wooden decorative stools hand turned and carved by my grand father, lampshades designed by my grand mother with hand pressed flowers. These I will not carry home with me. I have no place for them even if a part of me yearns for then. This is not the yearning for the game. These objects hold different images of the past, memories scattered and compliated. They remember family gatherings that can no longer happen as we all moved far from the trajectories once assumed to be ours. Those memories are too tangled in knotted weeds of angers and conversations never spoken to be welcomed in my home. They can remain of the past.
Sewing and embroidery scissors and needles are lifted out of a bag's side pocket. It is not clear who they once belonged to. They could have been my mother's, they could have been my grand mother's, they could even have been my step-father's first wife's. Now they are mine to use, to learn with. I lay the scissors flat in an open hand. The metal is cold, heavy, and clear. I remember similar tools tucked in sewing boxes, boxes opened to fix a button, to apply a patch to a ripped trouser and thinning elbow, a box I intentionally and carefully avoided as a child. I wish I hadn't, but back then I did not understand the history and power of women's skills. All I wanted was to drive tractors with the men. I still do not know how to drive a car, let alone a tractor, but I do know a handful of things about embroidery and sewing, a heritage forgotten, learned from strangers on the Internet.
Finally my mom unfolds a white handkerchief to reveal a gold plated rectangular lighter. 'It belonged to your grand mother when she smoked.'
'Grandma used to smoke,' I ask confused. I do not remember cigarettes about or any evidence of them. My family has always appeared staunchly anti-smoking and yet, here was a fancy lighter stamped with my grand mother's initials. I am immediately drawn to it. Modern plastic lighters offer little in the ways of rituals and connection to the fire they bring to candles and incense. This object I never knew existed is somehow imbued with the stories that make up rituals. I can imagine my grand mother, always impeccably dressed, always perfectly manicured, always perfectly poised on every single photo that emerges from boxes of memories. I can picture her flicking this lighter open and delicately lighting a long thin cigarette like a noir black and white movie. I want it. I want to carry this image of her, smoking, with attitude, with freedom and the delight of the life she never had. Long ago stories of her early twenties and the freedom she sought but never received flood me. This lighter has transformed into something imagined, stories never lived, but I can give her that, a completely different life she only half admitted of wanting as we spread Rummikub tiles of the polished wooden table of the dining room, my legs dangling from chairs far too big for me.
