Artifacts

I have been reading This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley this week. (It is an exquisite book and if you are interested in “spirituality, liberation, and the stories that make us” written by a preternaturally wise woman, I highly recommend it) It is likely to make another appearance in this newsletter in the next week or so.

But today, reading Chapter 14, Memory - I stopped to savor the opening in my spirit that her words created. She tells a story about a crucial moment in her father’s life that hinged upon a red ball cap, subsequently lost - and her father’s yearning, and her own, to have and hold that artifact.

“To have artifacts that possess our memories maybe makes it so a memory doesn’t sit so heavily upon us. It grants memory a body, something physical that you can grab hold of…”

~ Cole Arthur Riley

I’ve lost a lot of people, and still have some short term memory challenges I contend with after a long three year stint on chemotherapy. My home is full of artifacts.

Some of them are just nice objects or bits of collections from loved ones that have gone, and would just feel a shame to throw away. But others have something extra attached to them, something numinous, something that keeps the spirit of their owner, or of a transformative moment close.

As New Mexico negotiates these extraordinary wildfires we are all encouraged to have a go-bag and a list of essentials to grab quickly in case of evacuation. The online lists always tell you to grab the photo albums. I have literally one hundred years of photos - from the 1910’s- 2010 - in boxes on the top shelves of closets all over the house. I’ll let them burn. I don’t know the ancestors in them. I don’t recognize their faces or their old fashioned names written in cursive on the scalloped margins. Their horses, their reunions, their Model T’s their long dead dogs -all feel long gone to me. If they are with and around me, they are with me despite the photos, not because of them. I’ve drug them from house to house - my mother’s my grandmother’s - because of my heavy dusty loyalty and out of obligation. If they burned, I would only feel lighter.

But the artifacts I’ll save:

Our friend Ellie’s softball glove: Worn through many many softball seasons, that served her in some of her most joyful moments of older childhood and young adulthood, bequeathed to my daughter - her goddaughter, the Christmas before she died.

My grandfather’s milking stool: A worn plank, its edges rounded from use - nailed firmly but haphazardly with seven long nails into a thick stump of a branch, the bark stripped off, a fingerprint of red paint on the side, the same color as the old barn.

A necklace made by my mother, found after her death, wrapped around the neck of a mask from Ghana, a gift to her from a Ghanaian friend, discovered on a day when I shuddered with post-trauma from watching my mother’s death throes, fearful that the same suffering lay ahead for me. I looked up and noticed that the beads were not part of the mask, and found a silver fastener that I recognized from a time when my mother did a lot of beading. I unwound it and received a gift of reassurance from my mother when I needed it the most. I never wear it. I always keep it close.

I do wear my grandmother’s family ring although I think by now every piece of it has been replaced bit by bit by repairs over the years and probably no part of the ring in its current manifestation ever touched my grandmother’s skin. It was her pride and joy. A stone for her husband and children’s birth month on either side of a shiny moonstone in the center. We shared the same birth stone, my grandmother and I, our birthdays just a few days apart. We laughed that moonstones were more beautiful than diamonds - the “official” April birth stone - and that we both preferred the downgrade. She would hold it to the light and show me the half-moon refraction glowing in the stone. I remember how sad I felt for her, decades after her death, when the moonstone cracked and I took it to a jeweler to be replaced, and he told me it was plastic. Not even a real moonstone.

It is real now, and currently at the jeweler’s again for more repairs because I probably shouldn’t wear it every day but do anyway. I take it off only to wash dishes like my grandmother did.

I wear a shell pendant around my neck that my daughter bought for me the night of a glorious lunar eclipse in Santorini - the same night I had a transformative dream of a tree that was simultaneously living and dying - on a trip to Greece that I dreaded and felt overwhelmed by but that ultimately showed me that I was in fact, more alive than dead.

An artifact is a little piece of defiance. To say I was here. I existed, and this thing happened, whether you believe it or not. This cap right here. Feel the brim.’

~ Cole Arthur Riley

A round stone I found the morning after dreaming I found a round stone.

A silver ring: strangely in the the shape of giraffe, not my style at all, that arrived a month or so ago, near my birthday, that feels like I have been wearing it for years because it fits so perfectly. A memento of a friend who took his own life, given to me by his mother, as we contemplate and process his departure and absence together.

Some funny carved and painted wooden plates, probably German, that tell some story about a fox who kills a pet chicken, the boy who kills the fox and mourns his dead pet, and then carries it home happily in a sack for chicken dinner. Found, by truly my oldest friend, dead for about a decade, of course at a garage sale (always the garage sales) morbid and strange enough that he thought it was not only hilarious but that we had to buy them for my mother. He, as always, was low on funds, so I bought them for him to give to my mother and as they hang in my house my family members that never met him still call them “Bob’s plates”

This is a form of liberation - to be able to carry your own memories as you choose, to own them.

~ Cole Arthur Riley

And it keeps their power and their spirit close.

And all the love too.