Distant Memory

The year is 1948. I am two and a half. We have lived in Minneapolis for the last two years in the house on Ewing Avenue South. We will move again in two years to Virginia where my father will be an army captain at Fort Belvoire and my sister will be born when I am six.

My mother has never lived away from her family, and although she has made many friends here this first time she moves away from her hometown, she will not be so resilient the next eight times she moves and will sink into chronic mildly functional depression. Perhaps to avert that inevitability, perhaps a prescient dream has told her, perhaps because she is lonely for the friends she has had for more than thirty years, perhaps because my father travels the state to sell chemicals for Pittsburgh Plate Glass and leaves her alone with me from Monday to Friday, girlfriends from her hometown in Ohio visit this summer.

Our house is small. White clapboards shelter two bedrooms, a living room that opens to a dining room, the kitchen, single bath and stairs to the attic where the floor, painted cream and spattered with primary red, green, blue, and yellow, delights me. This decorating statement may be from a previous owner too timid to display energy in the public areas of the house. Indeed, the living room is papered with two-inch cream and off-white stripes.

“Aunt” Margaret, a spinster with whom my mother taught grade school, and whose brother she once dated but didn’t marry because he was Catholic, and Aunt Georgia, whose husbands proliferate throughout my young life, each one wealthier than the last, arrive in her '48 Cadillac to visit for a week. I can’t remember any of her last names.

Nor can I remember where they sleep, but I do remember the paisley comforter they sleep under, feathers of orange and blue intertwined on a sea of pale yellow. When we moved from Minneapolis to Virginia and then to Albuquerque, it remained boxed, probably at my grandmother’s house in Ohio. Not until we move back to Minneapolis for a couple of years until my dad was transferred yet again, this time to Illinois, do I see it.

Aunt Margaret always brings me books and reads to me. She carries herself with dignity and never misses mass. When we live in Albuquerque, she lights candles in the ancient church in Old Town, candles for her parents and the brother my mom had dated, now, sadly, dead.

Aunt Georgia wears her hair tied up in a scarf, with shorts and halter to match. She delights me in ways only a boy can appreciate. Her best trick is to sit on the toilet and boom out farts that echo in the bowl against water, against porcelain. Each time she uses the bathroom, I follow her in, a giggling shadow at her side. Each poot reverberates in the tiny space. Each time I laugh until my side aches.

No doubt we trek to Daytons in downtown Minneapolis – long before malls are built. No doubt we walk to Lake Harriet to watch the ducks and geese. No doubt we lounge on the beach at Lake Calhoun. Perhaps I even wade chest high under watchful eyes. No doubt.

Somewhere in heavenly life Aunt Margaret lights candles and prays. And somewhere Aunt Georgia delights celestial boys by sitting on the pot, reverberating farts.

Please comment below on your childhood memories.