June 15, 2005

Dear Margaret,

It pleased me; the way you appeared, as if from nowhere, quietly at my back door, like an old friend just stopping in from down the street. How I wish you lived closer and could do just that. You are like a sister to me now; a chain to the past and other half of the stories that I grew up on; a rope that pulls me into the future, more whole and more sane than I’d be without you. And, in some ways, you are a mirror, too, telling me who I am. In the reflection from the gnarled surface of the family that stayed in place, I am becoming more solid. There is substance where once I felt only the wind, the hollow vacuum of un-belonging to place, to community, to family, to history. I am putting down roots in this new place, where I am finally becoming, and becoming, and becoming…

I have pictures of you in the yard, perched on Calvin’s Little Tykes chair, like a farmer on a three-legged stool, with the foxgloves just beginning to bloom behind you. You are lovely, and at home, on my small fifty-by-thirty-foot plot, peeling apples from the hand-made ash basket you brought from Westfield. There are still a few apples in the basket, which now sits on the floor in my kitchen, next to the refrigerator. They have been kept too warm by the heat it gives off this time of year, and have begun to take on the sweet, waxyness of apples in autumn. It is the odor of your Uncle Patrick’s (my grandfather’s) truck, the smell of my murky childhood. I will always associate that smell with him and the mysteries of our family’s schism from the Vermont Rowley clan.

How strange and wonderful that we should have become friends these fifty-odd years after his exile. I have such a hard time attending to the demands of my immediate family, complicated by the alienation, passed on generation-to-generation, stemming from Pat’s irreverant, innatention to the collective family aspirations. What they were, we keep wondering, and characterizing, even scoffing in our ignorance, even as it diminishes with added details. Did they really want a dairy farming empire in Milton? What really drove them? How much did the girls really contribute to the farmland purchases for the men? Were there others who wanted to get out from under the matriarch? Did they get out, get away from the dominion of Helen Rowley, or did she continue to dominate them even from the grave? And what about him, Helen’s husband, Pat’s father? Who was he other than a state senator? How shamed was he by his son’s record of mischievous misdeeds, and then unfortunate transaction, that landed him in jail, with a cold shoulder from the exhasperated family? What did grandpa Pat’s father think? I never hear about him.
How much/many of the truth/s will come out? Does it even matter anymore? Somehow, I keep wanting to pry open the past, even as I find the present unbearable—Pat’s trangression’s did not stop when he left Vermont, collecting his children and wife from the places they sheltered during his stint in jail for selling the cows. Things may have been easier if his story had stopped there, but it was just the beginning of a series of dislocating events. Now, I wonder if any of it matters. It does. It does, I know, but I’d like sometimes to think that it might not.

When I was a kid, I loved climbing up into the attic at 618 S, Beech Street, where Pat and his wife, Mazel, my mother’s mother, ended up living when my mother headed off to medical school in Mexico, aspiring to physicianhood, like the children of aunt’s and uncles that remained true to the clan. When Mazel’s mother moved in with her from Vermont, after her husband Ralph died, there were lots of boxes of old things, china, cufflinks, hatpins, stacked, and sorted, then as the years passed, picked over, and disorganized-- probably nothing valuable, but they had a certain allure, just because they were old, and they were in the attic, where the light is strange, and even the dust is romantic.

Now, I don’t think I’d think much of the odd assortment, just the sorts of things you’d see at any ordinary rummage sale. Everything valuable had long since been sold. I wonder, if the whole mess with Pat will seem like that in a few years, as the last of the siblings involved in the conflict pass away, and only the cousins remain—1st and 1st, once removed; will it all seem dusty and boring, even downright plebian, like a tired Sunday diatribe—just another American family with an old horse to beat.

Perhaps we can open our mouths in merriment and let the flood of emotion pent up too long run like the spring snow melt, clear over the cobbles, just smoothing them a bit in gentle eddies of song and scented seasons.
Love,