remember when

memory + tomatoes + promises

While attempting some digital organization, I came across this draft — one of many random files on my laptop, many scribbled pages in assorted notebooks stashed around the house. Most of what I have are short story drafts in varying stages of completion, random lines of imagined dialogue, ideas for new short stories and other creative projects, and of course, the novel-in-progress which has been a bit neglected these last couple months and is now calling me back to it. But some of what I have are in the vein of what follows — brief musings on the small things that make a life.

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My niece likes to experience collective memory. She is four, so while her memories are accumulating, it has not been very long that she could reach back into her developing brain’s grasp of the passage of time and retrieve something shared with others. She does this often now, with a delightful seriousness, as though we are old college buddies or retired cousins.

“Remember when that was a hole?” (Her uncle filled the divot in the lawn with dirt so no one would trip.)

“Remember when we picked tomatoes?” (This we did once and now must do every time she comes to my house until tomato season is over.)

She does not yet know that remember when will form the solid core of weathered friendships, the loveliest parts of a marriage, the two words that make it near impossible to leave when your gut and your friends and your good sense say it’s over.

The gift of remember when is having people you can say it to, and having them remember, and having them remind you of a thing you might otherwise have forgotten. That sweet tang of memory, of sharing passages of a winding road with people you care about, with people who care about you.

Her memory is getting better backwards and forwards, so I have to be careful what I say to her.

“What time are we going to the playground?”

“Don’t forget we are making tomato sauce with our tomatoes.” (Still need to look up a recipe — had sort of meant it as a vague thing one could do with tomatoes.)

“Now can I go on the iPad? You said.”

Things were certainly easier when she had the attention span of a squirrel. But I hope she holds on to her sense of accountability, to the seriousness with which she takes a plan to do something with her. Plans, intentions, promises — they do matter. I hope she always knows how much she matters.

Still, we did run out of time to make tomato sauce from the tomatoes we’d picked. There is never enough time. Some plans fall through, some intentions fall short. She is beginning to learn the hard lesson that all of us, often, come up a little short. And, too, the beautiful, patchwork truth behind that lesson: that nevertheless, we keep filling in the holes with dirt, and picking the bursting tomatoes when they are ripe, and making plans for how to use up all the sweetness and share it with the ones we love.

Photo by Chad Stembridge on Unsplash