MOTHER'S PRECIOUS POSSESSION

Sis and I never knew what Mother kept inside her hope chest.  When she opened it to add  or view its content, we asked no questions. This was her special box.

As Mother grew older and her mind weaker, she opened the chest often. She’d thumb through the contents, then lock the peeling faux-mahogany box with a brass key as old as she. She once told us her mother gave her the chest to collect items for her future marriage.  I imagine she carried it to Greenwood, where she attended business school. On to Jackson to sit in her rented room at the YWCA . In a few months hence she moved the chest to her new apartment when she married our daddy.

By the time she was in her eighties she and her chest had moved into my home.  She struggled to remember from one opening to the next where she had laid the key to the aging lock. Often Mother would wail, ”Help me find the key,” as though it were made of a precious metal. Daddy,  Sis and I pretended we were on a  hunting expedition to humor her. After too many hunts, Daddy removed the lock from the chest, leaving a small round hole large enough to spoil some of her precious belongings.

A short time after her death in 2002, we opened the chest. What seemed, at first invasive, became a tour of our Mother’s youth.  We reveled in the1900s postcards written by her mother, photos of her high school days, tissue-wrapped carnival glass, embroidered dish towels and pillow cases, a baby ring,  her high school boyfriend gazing at us from a filigree frame, a 1920s diary written in pencil.

The real prize  sat hugging the bottom of the chest. A stack of telegrams Daddy, a telegrapher, sent Mother from his first sighting of her  in 1930 on the city streets, to twenty years after their marriage. Despite their age, the messages were legible. The words were humorous and poetic.They revealed to us daughters what a love-struck young man our daddy had been.

FIRST BIKE LESSON

  The west part of Jackson has changed in the seventy years I’ve been gone.  I have trouble finding Minerva Street.  It runs north and south off Capitol Street. I look for that hulky building that once housed the Coca-Cola plant in the mid 1940s. The building is there, on the corner, the adjoining railroad tracks making a slight protrusion here and there. I  turn left off Capitol Street and maneuver the torn street once full of stand-alone homes and small apartment homes. 

I recall the quiet evenings. This was an ideal street for us to live on. Sidewalks on both sides of the street allowing evening strolls after a hard day’s work.  With a short walk Daddy could be at work at the Postal Telegraph office on the other side of the viaduct separating North Jackson from West Jackson.

 I drive down  the street once, turn the car around and retrace the route. I stop at the spot where I lived for three happy years. There’s no house.  Only a parking lot full of vivid memories. Gone is the low wall that ran alongside between our house and the Sanantones.  I had looked for that wall to determine the location of my house. Most of the lots on the west side had been obliterated for additional parking.

My gaze falls across the street. I remember that house was different and didn’t belong on the street. Once I was invited inside to meet the elderly couple and their son. I can’t recall the reason I was there. They were sitting in the” parlor”, a space heater  inside a fireplace keeping them warm.  I gazed around to see the walls of a soft brown wood.  The house was a palace more than a home. With my “now” eyesight this same house sits with its roof caved inward from neglect. I cross the street and I see the brick sidewalk , still there, twenty giant steps long. The most elevated spot on the street.

 The beginning point of my bike lessons. The new shiny red bike was my August birthday gift.

Dad and I started at the bottom of the hill at the south end of the street . The push up the hill north to the house with its wide front porch and that brickwork on the sidewalk was difficult for skinny me, even with Daddy’s help. At the bricks I followed Daddy’s instruction. I scrambled onto the sea with Daddy holding onto the bike.  He pushed. Away I flew to the bottom of the incline, peddling fast and screaming with innocent joy. The bike remained upright with Daddy’s steady hand.  At the bottom of the hill I jumped off, turned the bike around and we repeated the push up the hill. 

 Despite the neighborhood disintegrating, the memory of bike lessons endures.  Those were special afternoons with my daddy.