monarchs of memory

short story

I remember the first time I deliberately tried to make a memory—a sort of meta-remembrance of the power of remembering—and the memory formed was thus:

It’s a snapshot of my foot, sandy from a day at the beach and tanned from many days at the beach, on the floor of my mom’s white Dodge Spirit in a ray of Atlantic sunlight. ‘Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)’ by Journey is playing from the cassette player. The only interruptions from the heat are the feeble breaths of the Spirit’s air conditioning. There’s a parking meter outside the window.

Right then, for some reason, I discovered the power of recall. Right then, I thought: I will recall this, exactly how it is, years from now, for no other reason than I am deciding to do so.

And this memory has always stuck. I can recall it and step inside it as though I am there.

Or can I?

As we know, memories are incredibly fallible. A study in the 1990s revealed it was possible to implant false memories through mere suggestion approximately 25% of the time. And what if I implanted them myself? Are they any less suggestive, any less real?

What gives me further pause is when I visited the old house with my mother.

The old house: our former home, the one I grew up in, the farmhouse, built in the 1860s, taken up by my parents shortly before my birth and where we spent 25 years as a family as it tumbled through various stages of fix-up and remodeling, the roof re-done, the painted-shut windows replaced, the sagging porch resurrected, only to be sold in the heat of the post-COVID housing market so that my parents could downsize to a townhouse closer to their urbanized children.

It was an unintentional visit, or so I was led to believe. “Let’s go around the golf course to get back to route 67,” my mother had told me, and I obeyed without realizing where such a route would take us, my directional shortcomings a weakness she fully exploited. I would have objected. I wasn’t ready to see it. The way I dealt with leaving behind such a trove of heartache was to shut it away.

My mother, though, obsessed over the house and its state since leaving it nearly a year before. “There it is,” she announced as it appeared over the hill, with a sort of grandiosity that was all her own. It was how she was; she could turn anything into a mythology of which she was the priestess. “Slow down, slow down!” she implored as we drove closer.

“Mom,” I started, but by then I was also overtaken by a curiosity as to what had become of my old home. There was a large dumpster settled at one end of the driveway.

“I was talking to Deb the other day and she said they’re never there,” she said as we came to the stop sign at the T intersection at the bottom of the hill, the one I slid through and into the split rail fence during the ice storm of my 18th birthday.

“Looks like they’re doing some renovations,” I said. We idled longer at the stop sign.

“Oh, let’s just stop by, don’t you think?” she asked. I did not want to stop by, at risk of having an awkward interaction with the current owners. But it was no different than when an hour before she had asked to say hi to my old kindergarten teacher who also happened to be at the restaurant I’d taken her for her birthday. A request I could not deny for reasons of my own social deficiencies.

“Let’s just pull up the driveway,” I said, turning on my directional and creeping up the small stretch of road and into the driveway. There were tiger lilies and Queen Anne’s lace in abundance along the edges of the property. The grass was high enough to have made my father’s eye twitch, but his new inability to keep it mowed to perfection was a key factor in their leaving. Little milkweed plants and weeds were starting to pop up.

I forgot the property was the most beautiful place in the world.

“I don’t think anyone is here,” my mother observed. “You know what Deb said, she said they don’t even live here. They were doing renovations before they were going to move in but they haven’t finished. Isn’t that a shame?” my mom said. She unbuckled her seatbelt and got out of my Jeep, even though it was still running.

It was her birthday, and she was taking advantage of it. I sighed and killed the engine, got out and caught up to her. She was already going up the porch steps, the porch under which we found the lost little barn kitten we called Ragtime and who lived with us for 17 years. I realized that her request for dinner in our old hometown was singularly guided by an eye toward this adventure.

“I wonder if they even changed the locks,” she said, pulling out her keys. She still had the old house key. I reached forward and tried the handle before she could insert it; it felt locked at first, but I knew better. You had to lift it a bit, turn to the right, jiggle it and—

Already unlocked, opened.

It was empty inside, or at least devoid of valuables or possessions. It used to smell like our old shoes, this mudroom, but then it smelled like the sawdust that accompanies construction. They had demolished the wall between the kitchen and the living room, the one that hosted my father’s thousand books, and it sat in a half-hearted state of deconstruction and perhaps becoming a kitchen island.

We walked through the dining room, footsteps resounding on the original wood floors in a way they never could when it was full of our former lives. “Let’s go upstairs, see what they’ve done up there,” my mother suggested.

I was afraid that some construction worker or the new owners would come by, but it was late evening already, and anyways, there was no stopping her.

The third stair creaked as it always did. When we got to the top my mother turned to go to her old room and I stood on the landing in front of the linen closet.

It was there, in that spot, where my first—or, what I perceive to be my first—memory was formed, unconsciously and without attempt:

I am laid on my back on the runner and my grandmother opens the linen closet to pull out some baby powder. She kneels down with difficulty and undoes my soiled diaper, and as she does so her face scrunches with disgust. I laugh, a real, full-bellied laugh. “Oh you think that’s funny?” she asks. Then she’s laughing too, and we laugh together.

Could this first memory have been implanted, suggested? No one ever told me it. Yet it existed; perhaps it had undergone edits, revisions over the years. For example, how might I know what my grandmother had said? Surely I was not speaking yet, nor could I fully understand when adults spoke. Or perhaps she did say “Oh you think that’s funny?”, but only now, after the fact, could I interpret her words?

When I stepped into my room, I was surprised to find it no longer smelled like me, instead there was only the odor of late summer light through a dusty window pane. I stood where my bed once was, realizing it was in that very spot I had probably spent most of my moments being alive.

In a way, I resented my mother for this return; only eight months earlier I had been there as they moved out, clearing up the last of my lingering childhood belongings, and cried and cried as my entire past felt like it was dissolving away, and I came to grips with it through those tears. Now it felt like I needed to come to grips with it again, but the tears had dried up.

My mother had no such problem. I heard her sniffle from down the hall and shook myself free of melancholy to go find her standing in her empty, old bedroom, with the wallpaper I always thought was tacky. We called their room ‘The Treehouse’ because the nearby branches of the maple trees through the windows gave the illusion you were situated in a tree amongst them. She was looking out the window with a stare full of seeing something I could not.

I’m not good at addressing these situations, so all I could do was put arm around her. She asked me:

“Do you remember, when you were about ten years old, one day you were playing outside on a summer day, just like this one, and you came running inside yelling about butterflies, ‘butterflies everywhere!’ And we looked out the window and there were hundreds, maybe thousands of monarch butterflies, they were all over the trees and down in the field!”

I did not remember this. Monarch butterflies? All over the trees and in the fields? It felt like I would have remembered such an occasion. It seemed more like a dream my mother conflated with reality. But in the moment it would have felt like a denial was an issuance of disagreement, and the beginning of an unneeded argument.

“Yeah, I remember,” I said. “It was beautiful.”

It was her birthday, after all.

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When I got home I researched the probability of such an occurrence of monarch butterflies. Apparently it wasn’t so impossible. Monarchs migrate in large groups from Mexico all the way to Canada every summer, and Upstate New York was on the way and a frequent stopping point.

Did I remember witnessing such a happening? I closed my eyes and found I could see it: juggling my soccer ball on the mowed part of the lawn, the sun’s rays hot but angled as it set, my dog sniffing around, and when I look up at a nearby tree I think fall has come early, the orange and black intermingled with the leaves, my surprise upon closer inspection, running up to the house to alert my family.

Was this my own? Or had my mother suggested it there?

I realized that the more I thought about it, the more I wanted it there, and the more space my mind created for the memory and filled in its gaps. Like the back of my mom’s Dodge Spirit, only in reverse, pulled from immateriality rather than intention.

And I thought: what did it matter, whether the monarchs visited my old home? If my mother thought they did, then they did, and I could accommodate it. If misremembering meant I could harbor the feeling that my old home was at some point a special waypoint for thousands of migrating monarch butterflies, then I could focus on how it made me feel rather than whether it happened or not.

Reality exists in two places at once; within us and without us, and where the two points intersect is our mere perception of it, forever at the border of distinction and ephemerality.

From then on, when I thought of our old home, I made a point to recall the monarchs, kings and queens of my memory.

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thanks for reading this story involving the power of memory. even if you didn’t like it, maybe click the little heart button so that people who might will find it.

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BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS:

Do you think the incident with the monarch butterflies really happened?

Have you ever revisited an old home you lived at for a while and then moved away from? How did it make you feel?

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thanks for reading PNP, where we love monarch butterflies. if you liked this story, you might also like my novel, the big T, posted here on Substack: