Of Time and Memory by Don J. Snyder Read Free Book Online Page A

afternoon that was what I prayed for.” He tells me that every year in August he places the flowers at the church altar in Peggy’s memory.
    When I try to leave, he keeps me another hour standing at the door. He won’t say goodbye until I tell him when I will return.
    I didn’t return the next day as I had promised my grandfather. And I didn’t stay in Pennsylvania long enough to visit my father either. The hell of it was that it was just too damned sad; I don’t mean for me, I mean for them—for the father who prayed for his daughter to get well and for the ninety-year-old man who Peggy’s father had become, and for the young husband coming home from work each afternoon to find his wife still too weak to get out of bed and for the seventy-one-year-old man her husband had become. I had told myself from that first night in the attic with my little girl that I was going to try to learn Peggy’s love story and then tell it for my father, as a gift to him at the end of his life. This had felt like the right thing to do until I saw the sadness in his eyes when we were parked in front of the church. It wasn’t the wedding that he remembered as we sat there, it was the funeral. How could I have failed to see that it would be this way for my father, that it would always be this way because she never did get well enough to spend much time with him when he was helping her father build his little house on School Street, the house where my brother and I were taken at Christmas every year though we never knew why. Of course the sadness of Peggy’s death had eclipsed their love story, and always would in his memory.
    And then seeing my grandfather cry, his shoulders shaking as we sat in his room at the nursing home surrounded by pictures of his lost daughter—it was just too damned sad.
    Driving home to Maine, north for eight hours, the feeling of returning that I’d had at Peggy’s grave was with me again. Maybe we are always returning, and the first step we take, we took long ago. I could still feel this as I stepped onto the moonlit porch of my house. It was midnight. The bare tree branches were rattling in the wind off the sea. It was well below zero and the porch stairs sounded like they were splitting beneath my feet. Above my head, white stars were scattered across a black sky, near enough to show the sharpness of their edges. The same stars from the last night of my mother’s life when she lay in her mother’s bed, unable to sleep, perhaps sensing the blood storm just ahead of her. And her husband in a separate room lost to grief.
    Lost. Lost for so long. Always lost to me.
    And maybe better if she were always lost to me.
    Maybe it would have been better that way. Or if not better, then certainly easier. One visit to Peggy’s grave, a few companionable days with my father.
    I was surprised to find Colleen awake when I came upstairs. She was sitting up in bed with her reading lamp on. “I’ve just had the most wonderful dream,” she said to me. “I dreamed that you found Peggy. You were walking down this beautiful road in the country, not just you, but all four of the kids and I were with you. We were calling her name. I could hear Cara with her high-pitched voice calling for Peggy. And then we saw someone up ahead standing on the side of the road. And it was her. She looked exactly the same, she hadn’tgotten old, and she said she was waiting for us to take her home with us. She’d been waiting a long time. She took Erin’s hand and we all turned around on the road and came home to Maine.”
    I sat down on the bed and asked her if my father or my grandfather was in the dream. They weren’t, she said.
    I told her that I was afraid of hurting them and that I had decided to just let things go.
    â€œAudrey called while you were gone,” Colleen said.
    My mother’s sister, who had been born just ten months before my twin