What Remains

It's Not Pretty.

Someone has to explain to me why some things are imbedded in my brain while others, deeply significant to me, have flown the cranium coop. Should not memory be attuned, emotionally selective, separating the wheat from the chaff? Yet another flaw in our species’ grand design, if you ask me, right up there with the mechanics of childbirth.

Anyway, a memory came to me yesterday. I think it’s because we have been going to so many real estate showings, and I probably have some degree of PTSD, remembering all those time frantically preparing my own houses to be sold.

Around twenty years ago, Sam and I were looking at a place in a rural part of the town we currently live in, near a state park and lots of open space. It was idyllic, an 18th century Cape surrounded by stone walls, and after walking in the front door, I was immediately smitten. The house was also immaculate- something our own home was basically never. I went from room to room- the living room with its roaring fire and view of mountain across the street, the pond in the backyard, frozen over; the carved four poster bed in the bedroom, the hooked rug in the living room. I went into the small half bath off the foyer, which was painted a delicate cornflower blue, and glancing down, saw, floating in the toilet, a lone turd, on the small side and medium brown, seasoned past the point of stinking anything up. The well-heeled realtor had been busy cozying up to the preppy couple while ignoring me, who had shown up in corduroys and an old down jacket. Well, I thought, that floater would take her down a peg. I remember leaving without saying anything, and hoping that, upon glancing into the powder room toilet, the preppy couple was as surprised as I had been.

When I write from memory, I mix what I actually recall and things that I can imagine happening, hoping to at best tell an accurate story or at worst convey the gist of it. In this particular memory, my actual and quite vivid recollection was not the roaring fire or the powder room’s cornflower blue, or even the wooden bowl of apples on the kitchen counter I am just telling you about now, but that poop half-submerged in the toilet bowl. In a world full of beauty and wonder, my memory is shit. It’s a great argument for continuing to write fiction.