It's been more than sixteen years since my mother died and the photo had hung in her bedroom. I always thought the size was overwhelming. It isn't that I ever measured it, but it took up so much wall space.
When my father retired after twenty-five years of teaching, and then as a principal of a neighborhood elementary school for fifteen years, he and my mother moved to Miami. They bought a two-bedroom condo in a building that was on one of the many canals that connect up to a larger waterway. When you wait that long for ownership, your home acquires a status that is unknown to people who have always lived in a home they owned.
My father swept the small outdoor deck every day and once a week washed the concrete floor. My mother bought wall-to-wall shag carpet and a rake to keep the rug strands standing up straight. They bought an overhead kitchen fixture that would have lit up an entire house. The glow from the lights set off the kelly green and yellow wallpaper in a psychedelic frenzy.
Several of my paintings hung in the living room. They weren't any good and I wondered if my mother thought they were good or if she hung them because I had painted them during my phase of palette knife creations and she liked to show off my creations.
The bedroom was fairly spacious and that's where my mother displayed photos of her two grandchildren. The photo of eight-year-old Elyse and our dog Snoopy, so named by David and Elyse, hung on the wall to the right of their bed. With a frame the photo measured twenty- three inches by twenty- nine inches. An equally large photo of David wearing a sweatshirt and looking as if he was ready to play a game of basketball - hung on the same wall.
Even when they were both in high school those photos remained--frozen in time— a time when we lived in Maryland and the neighborhood was designed for kids. We lived on a dead end street where learning how to ride a bike was safe, where kids gathered for informal games, and July 4th parties included all the people in the neighborhood. Everyone brought a dish to share. We lived in a multi-cultural neighborhood and the dishes were from Morocco, Greece, and Iran—even England and of course a healthy sprinkling of southern cooking. Our next-door neighbor might bring a pecan pie made with the pecans picked on her in-laws property in the Mississippi delta.
Even though there were other photos none were enlarged and none ended up on the wall. The small snapshots were kept in a box that once held a sweater from Macys Department Store. A red rubber band held the box together when it bulged with photos that included some taken of me when I was younger than the pictures on the wall. Once I bought my parents a photo album thinking that they might want to replace the box with an organized system for viewing photos. My mother often reminded me that one day she'd put everything in order, but it never happened.
When my father died my mother kept the small photo taken of both of them in a silver toned frame on her nightstand. Elyse and David remained on the wall--ever caught in a certain age. David was graduating high school and Elyse was in her second year of high school.
My mother was playing maj jong when her head throbbed and she couldn't stand. By the evening she was prepared for surgery to stem bleeding in her brain. When I flew down to Miami she was in intensive care. The nurse said, "Talk to her. The last sense that goes is hearing." When I walked into the room I found my mother attached to tubes and monitors--a small presence within that space. I talked and held the hand least encumbered by plastic lines. "I love you," I said. And I believe she so faintly squeezed my hand. "Is that possible?" I asked the nurse. "You felt it, didn't you? Then she responded."
My aunt had lived with my father and mother after she no longer could afford her own apartment. After my father died she and my mother continued the arrangement. When my mother died my aunt moved into the larger bedroom. She had never had children and kept the portraits on the wall. By this time David had graduated college and traveled around the world taking his own photos. For a while he thought of becoming a photographer. Elyse studied fashion design.
My aunt, who loved Japanese art, left her pictures in the smaller bedroom and lived with the portraits and the landscape I bought my parents when I traveled to Italy between my junior and senior year in college.
In a year her memory deceived her and she roamed the apartment, a visitor in a foreign country where all the signposts were written in a different script. We had to move her to a place where the perimeters were locked and the geography changed. In the few months she lived in the other space we kept the condo. After she died we cleaned out the apartment, gave away the furniture, sent the clothes to the Salvation Army, looked for the box of photos and couldn't find the box. I took two maj jong tiles, a china cup and saucer, and an old prayer book. I looked for the tallit my father received when he turned thirteen, but that was gone. And we went back to our home.
The attorney took care of selling the unit, but first he had a cleaning service in to straighten up, clean and paint the unit. Several days later Fed Ex delivered a box with the remnants. Most of the items I threw out, but there was the portrait of Elyse. The portrait of David had darkened with age and probably insufficient time in the fixer.
I didn't know what to do with this large portrait. I put it in the basement ten years ago. Whenever I cleaned and reordered the basement I moved it to a different place.
It remained in the basement—Elyse now has three children, David has five children.
Three weeks ago I looked at the photo and noticed brown spots in the background. Soon they would move to cover the entire surface and the portrait would become faint and finally disappear. I took the portrait into a photography store and arranged to have it copied and an eight by ten print made. "I'd also like the jpg," I said.
Last week I picked up two prints-- one a black and white and one a softer toned print. I rather like the soft tones. They belie the years after the photo. I printed out two four by six prints at a local drugstore.
I placed the eight by ten prints in an archival photo album where I store some of the photos I've taken--none are portraits. I added one of the smaller photos to a small plastic sleeved album of family portraits.
The remaining small print I’ll send to Elyse. I don't expect that she'll respond, but perhaps she'll look at the portrait and remember another time when she dressed Snoopy in clothes, or let Snoopy watch her draw Charlie Brown, Lucy and Snoopy. I wonder if she still has any of those drawings—
“Lucy: Have you ever thought about writing sort of a memoir? You know, putting down things you remember about the past.”
“Snoopy: (typing) This is what I remember about last week”
