In my 6th grade Spanish class, we spoke dorky dialogues from the text after listening to them on cassettes, and I remember only this one:
?Que esta en la bolsa?
asks the girl of the boy holding a paper lunch sack.
Es una culebra,
he answers.
With no further explaination. Or maybe my brain got stuck on sentence two and I can't remember. But, who carries a freaking snake in a lunch bag?
Was it a bad joke? Was he a future serial killer?
Was the textbook company fucking with little minds?
I guess I'll never know.
But for the rest of my life, when I see a bag my brain asks what's in it, in espanol, a little OCD quirk.
But guess what? We can play ?Que esta in Mel's bolsa?
It won't be a reptile, that's for sure. It's not a chicken either, though I love this close approximation to a Delaware game cock. I was raised a first stater, graduated UD, go fightin' Blue Hens! and I have a wee fascination with all things chicken, since I grew up in the land of chicken farms, had many a chicken pet, including my favorite, bantums with chicks, teeny tiny chickens!, and my sister's chicken Lucky, who fell off the chicken truck, who was, as it turns out, poorly named. Oops, chicken tangent. Anyway.
So...
?Que esta en la bolsa?
Well, it's these. I need them. All in one place.
Handy.
Es mi libros.
? Que esta in los libros?
What's spanish for my life, my stories, my manic journals? Notebooks? Therapy and conversations with myself?
Can you guess which is which?
One's from high school, mid 70's, still in use for logging important data like the list of every book I've read since about middle school, flight logs, kid quotes, safety tips, or deep thoughts. Life stuff.
Ones from 1983, a chronicling of all the events and milestones since college, meeting my husband, starting a family, pets and kids and travels. Kept faithfully for 27 years and current.
One's a really lame fiction story I started, and am now forever stuck.
One's the cancer book. On hold.
One's the daily phone crap, Dr. appt. reminders, miscellany. Full.
One's a journal from 2 years of parenting and thinking. Material.
One's a journal of quotes I copy from books I read. To reread. Again.
One is a nature journal and some sketches from our vacation home in the hills. Kindof lame, especially my sketching.
One is just random notes, things to do, another is lists of fun things to do, places to go, adventures to take with the kids.
I am nothing without facts, data, lists and words. I am my scribe.
But wait there's more, just not in the bag.
I don't keep en mi bolsa my 3 ring binder of all the loose stuff, lists like every movie I've ever watched, books I need to read, and stories I write and memories I catch, or pages of collected family stories. It's too big and would tear the chicken bag. But I wish it fit, then everything I'd grab in a fire would be in one place.
The binder is just too full. Everything in here is important life stuff. To me.
Mi piquito famlia on the cover, and hundreds of rabbit holes inside. Want to hop down one?
What's inside that letter?
A note I wrote to myself last year to help me remember....
this.
One of the odder coincidences in my life. My sick mom is in the hospital getting chemo, breast cancer, round two, Dad dying. I fly from IL to DEL for the umpteenth time, which drains me, even in good times, and this was not a good time. Mom asked me to make her bed, which is overwhelming because she hoards and everything is so hard to do. I try not to drip tears on her sheets, and decide to chip away at safe footing around the bed and begin to sort through piles of junk mail, newspapers, papers, stuff and I find the evelope with the butterfly and for some reason look inside, and there is this little piece of me I gave to her, this letter I wrote about making her bed because I love her and Dad, and a drawing of her cluttered bedroom in my childhood home. I even drew piles of clothes then, and I was sad now from crawling over the piles of clothes 30 years in the future, where she surrounds herself with bits from her past, just like I do now. I cried some strange tears and laughed some, too. At least I made the bed, because I didn't get much else done that night.
But think of it. Of all the clutter piles in my mom's house now, where she's pushing level 4 hoarding, I pick up the one paper pile to sort with that letter in it. I can't begin to explain the odds of that happening, and you probably can't imagine the vanloads of paper in every room, or corner, or the mountains of clothes higher than I can reach, because I'm the shortest, by far. Anyway, the odds were astronomical, and I feel like maybe little me wrote that note for big me to find, to comfort me, but it made me sad because i couldn't have imagined this future. It was pretty wabi-sabi.
Life is really strange sometimes. I think that note found me.
ps I can make a box. I just learned.
I was so proud. I made a few of them just to prove it.
The mom in me was so proud of the young me.
Sometimes I wish I could time travel just so I could go back and comfort that child, steer her clear, spare her some things, make sure she remembered all the good things, because I really wish I had all those memories now.
I kept the letter. I never told mom I found it or that I took it, and I don't think she knew it was there anymore. So now it's part of my piles of papers.
How can I not keep the reminders (remainders?) of my odd life? Aren't they treasure somehow? Or proof? I'm trying not to worry about the hoarding aspect of this, I figure I'm maybe a level two right now, and realization is the first step to recovery, right? And everything is neatly, compulsively stashed in cute little notebooks and bags. It soothes me to put things in things, away.
Maybe we'll play more ?Que esta in something else full of pieces of me.
I got stuff stashed Everywhere.
Oooh, remind me sometime to tell you about the letter my grandma emily wrote that my daughter emily made me find. More Wabi-Sabi serendipitous weirdness. Until then,
Hasta luego, mi amigas.
Muchas gracias.
Oh - and
?Que esta in tu bolsas?
(Whats in your bags?)
