Damn Fine Sentence #131
“…you can’t pick and choose your memories; your memories choose you.”
I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a personal memory the words bring up. It’s about how books connect with your life.
“…you can’t pick and choose your memories; your memories choose you.”
———Shanda Buchanan
———Black Indian
In my backyard, I kneel on the hard-packed earth to find a spot for one more purple coneflower sprout. The newbie will join a dozen veteran echinacea struggling through their first year. Most of my gardening attempts wither in Kansas City’s clay and humidity. Deer eat the survivors.
Digging in the dirt is a sweaty thankless expenditure of time that aggravates my allergies and feeds the mosquitos. I will never finish whatever it is I do out here in this so-called flower bed, and beyond it, in this half acre of wannabe landscaping. The yard will never allow me a satisfied there, that’s that.
Yet, here I am again, unable to resist.
When I was a girl, Mama corraled my siblings and me to pick dandelion greens. Picking greens from the clay of our Des Moines yard was the only activity Mama and I shared in the twelve years we lived in the same house … before Dad took the kids and moved across the country … before Mama became as much a stranger in my real world as she’d been in my emotional world.
As I squash a mosquito—no doubt a descendant of the Des Moines pests who’d tortured me way back when—Mama’s memory chooses me. Mama chooses me.