Sitting on the window seat in the family room this morning, I ate a Oui vanilla yogurt and resisted the the temptation to make use of my time by grabbing a nearby book of poetry or adding another piece to the jigsaw puzzle within arm’s reach. I watched the backyard, instead. Today is grey, dreary, and wet. The rain has not let up since I opened my eyes. The day’s low temperature is supposed to be one degree above freezing, and there’s a bit of slush on the back deck.
After Thanksgiving, I moved most of the pumpkins that sat on the front porch steps to places around the yard. One of the larger ones at the base of Stella’s teepee is getting eaten by something. The bright orange rind of one side is nearly all gone, exposing fibrous innards the color of an Orange Cream frozen treat. While I knew that the pumpkin eater was in all likelihood a squirrel (named Peter, perhaps?), I held out hope that it might be something a bit more exotic, even though the teeth marks were undoubtedly not those of a fox, let’s say. My suspicions were confirmed and hopes dashed this morning. A grey squirrel was feasting on the pumpkin, and when it climbed atop, curled itself around the front of the gourd because it prefers eating upside down(?), I thought, Grab the camera and put on the big lens. Then I thought, It will be too late once you get all that done, which was followed by, Just do it. Why do you even have that great big lens? So, I gave in, and the squirrel disappeared, but I can comfort myself with the words of Sally Mann: “Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.”
She may very well be right. I ask myself to picture someone I once knew, calling to mind friends, family, relatives, and what do I see? My Aunt Mabel in a muted pastel floral blouse and dark blazer as she sits next to a table at a niece’s wedding reception; my mom, mischievous grin on her face, lying, in her pajamas and housecoat, on an air mattress in the living room when her sister’s family came to visit; my dad, smiling in his forties, leaning against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, sharing the frame with a two-liter bottle of Pepsi—not a drink often found at our house. Then there’s my friend Erin, with her big sweater and long dark hair, sitting with me and my mother-in-law, who is holding a complaining Baby Luke, on the blue floral couch, still bright from the factory.
I wonder, though, do auditory folk keep their memories in pictorial form? I have a hard time recalling the sound of someone’s voice, and now I wonder if that might be why I’ve never been good at accents or imitations. Maybe I’ll ask Dennis about it.