Feathers

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

Everybody in the universe knows Emily Dickinson’s poem about hope and the vast majority find it inspiring or at least worth memorizing. Hope is, after all, necessary for all of us, and most of us find it at some time in life. The more important question is whether we manage to hold on to it or whether it flies away between our fingers and never returns.

I remember when hope was everywhere, when - without realizing it - I was drowning in it, and happily.

I remember that the hardest thing to hope for was for time to pass quickly when I was waiting for a holiday to arrive. Or for our short family vacation to happen (it was ten days, always from the end of August until Labor Day). I remember how the major preparatory activities were part of the vacation and so the ten days became twenty. I remember the three kinds of cookies my mother and I baked and froze. I remember the enormous ham she baked, and the roast. I remember helping her, but also helping my father with his part of the packing, which was everything we needed for the days of fishing on the great river that formed the northern border of our state.

Hope was what we had the most of, and so we took food to eat while planning to bring back more food in the form of fish. Hope that there would be a lot of bass and other kinds so that the cooler would return home overflowing and we could share our good fortune with my father’s elderly relatives. I remember the smiles on my great aunts’ faces when he placed the packages wrapped in white paper in their gnarled hands.

I remember, not so many years later, hoping for the poor but generous man to regain his strength as his heart began to give out. Maybe I hoped there was a deity who would see how good he had been to others his whole life and would be spared. That was not to be. I remember the night he gave up, his heart done with the world, and it is a memory I’d give everything not to have.

Of course there are many other things I recall, and like any person my age, they are both good and bad things. I wish it were possible to choose our memories, but we can’t do that. We never know what will continuously haunt us or what will pop up when least expected. Also, some things have no reason for remaining in our mental archives while others disappear. Here’s a brief list of things I remember but maybe shouldn’t; do with it what you will:

A restaurant on the road to the Santiago de Compostela airport, with the best salads ever.

The indigenous name for Mud Creek (Ganargua), where I used to catch tadpoles, watch them grow into frogs, then release them. This memory makes the inflatable frog costumes from recent political protests very special.

The nest of starlings in the wall of the barn behind my childhood home. I climbed up on a cinder block to spy on the babies. It wasn’t a pretty smell, but I loved seeing the noisy, yellow-edged mouths jumping about.

The chipmunk in the clearing of the Sacred Grove where the Book of Mormon was supposedly found. I know the bike I used to ride there was blue.

Teaching myself cursive at six a year before I was allowed to use it in school.

The steelie my older cousin gave me when he passed along his whole marble collection.

The couselo plants growing on the damp green walls of San Xulián church in Bastabales. Strong but small, like tiny umbrellas protecting bits of moss and lichen from rain.

Eating callos (tripe) in Madrid on my first visit to Spain and getting very sick, although it might not have been their fault, since I’d been given a cup of chartreuse that was out of my league.

Wearing a (probably polyester) wig in high school because other girls wore them sometimes and so it was cool. Related to wearing that perfect, if fake, hair was sleeping, or trying to sleep, with my real hair, which I knew was ugly, in big rollers.

The little church in Noia with the lids of sarcophagi standing on end to show off the guild symbols carved into them.

Flying for the very first time, to Puerto Rico, and finding out that the “Modified American Plan” (MAP) didn’t include tips for waiters, so my last dollars had to go on the table because otherwise they refused to serve us. We were dumb college undergrads - what did we know about tipping?

The visit to a ceramicist in a Portuguese village named Galegos near Barcelos. Maybe the artist was already famous then, or maybe that would come later.

Baiting fishhooks with the shiniest minnows in the world and not cringing when their tiny lips were pierced. Half a century later I named a cat Minnows, but perhaps shouldn’t have done that.

Watching my cranky grandfather test all the Christmas lights for hours before they could be placed on the tree. Only years later would I realize he must have been very OCD, because back then the condition hadn’t been identified.

Asking in the second week of Spanish 101 in college if that language had a hortatory subjunctive like Latin has. (It doesn’t.)

My first fountain pen.

Watching my grandfather listen to baseball games on the radio in his bedsit in Ithaca, New York.

Feeling embarrassed because a boy who was a year younger had a crush on me and always came to sit and drool over me on our porch.

When Hurricane Hazel almost blew my grandmother off that porch when she and my mother went out to retrieve the lawn chairs. Weather reporting was not sophisticated back then.

The first time I visited the Colexiata do Sar on the outer limits of Santiago.

The word for fish bones in the village of Santabaia de Camba (arganas).

At this point I should stop making a list, because memories are pretty much endless - until they’re not. You may have noticed the ones here have no rhyme nor reason, but the brain works that way. The only thing worth noting is that jumbling is inevitable and we can follow a word or a piece of scenery, an article of clothing, a certain scent anywhere, not able to stifle the past that is attached to it, no matter how long ago the memory entered our lives nor how recently it has been created. Some memories become smudges and we struggle to bring them out of the darkness, while others follow us around constantly until we beg to forget.

However, when the forgetting begins, we may panic, and rightfully so. We may no longer have the persons needed to help us sustain them or the fading becomes our biggest fear. My only hope is that, like the nest of starlings in the backyard or the blue heron in a German river whose name has left me, I will not lose that last little bit of hope that is a reminder of who I am and where my life has taken me.