"No one has the same relationship with each individual. 

The older I get the more comfortable I am with accepting that our own reality is our own. Every chapter is filled with characters unique to our unfolding story. What we know and love is made up of unique moments that can’t be fully remade or retold as they actually were experienced or even as they might have truly been.   

Sit in a funeral and listen to someone talk about their recollections or encounters with someone you too knew and you’ll notice that there’s similarities and dissonance. 

We knew them as we know them. 

Lewis said it this way:

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory “In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

My grandmother is a Genie that I cannot get back in the bottle. She’s far bigger than the actual container that her lived life contained. 

She is known to me in the irritating, sweeping of a broom. 

In the clinking of a spoon in a stirring coffee cup. 

In the scent and swirl of cigarette smoke. 

In birds chirping in cages. 

In the smell of mint crushed in the palm. 

In the feel of crumbling rock. 

In the popcorn bowl. 

The feel of dog fur. 

And in the primordial sounds of a Peacock that roamed her home.

Many of my memories as a young child revolved around her and the mountain home she ruled. Her stormy moods and her unapproachable grandmothering are like a spell cast over my coming of age.

All of the fairytales that have mysterious women who haunt the woods or castles contain her. I loved her in her unlovableness and her wonder. I needed her and still do in some unknowable way. 

My mother was possessed by her and tried to exercise her unsuccessfully. I learned to love women with demons through my senses, memories, joys and troubles. 

She created a world I still try to build from these unreadable blueprints, because I was mesmerized by her shadows and dancing light in my heart and mind. 

She’s been dead most of my life and yet today she lives right outside my window roaming my yard on this mountain hillside. 

I bought this house in part, because her memory demanded it. 

I am a man shaped by earthquaking women.