It is the 15th of November. I am waiting for the cab to fetch me. The doors have been locked. The morning sun has shifted. The chair on which I sit is shaded by the wall behind me. Some weeks back, sunlight dappled this part of the porch. My parents used to sit here in the late afternoon and greet everyone who passed by. Those who were close to them would ask where their children were. They would tell them, they are in the big city.
It is a day after my sister’s birthday. She is missing my mother, who would always send her birthday cards via snail mail. The persons in the post office loved my mother dearly: She was one of the remaining few who went there with greeting cards on which she would paste stamps. They were for us. She would see to it that we received the card a day before our respective birthdays. She was never contented with the words printed on the card; to those words, she would add her thoughts written in the rounded, slightly tilted cursive letters teachers of long ago were trained to write.
Without the card this year, my sister resorted to reading the old cards and letters our mother sent her. She told me she counted the blessings that came her way. She also had to cancel her trip because her eyes were puffy after spending the whole day crying and missing Mama.
I assure my sister, my mother is happier and healthiest where she is now. My sister agrees.
This morning, a silvery black butterfly flits around my head. I tell my sister this and she is further assured. As with other families, we see butterflies as good signs, soft messages from those who had gone ahead of us. As the butterfly swoons, it flicks around my arm.
How does one embrace a butterfly?
No one is looking, I tell myself. I then stretch my arms as if about to hug someone standing right in front of me. Is that a whisper? It is the crisp November air, and the clouds steadily, but forever, saying goodbye.
The butterfly is gone. I am looking at the orchids nurtured by Mama when she could still walk and water them. It has ceased to be a cluster of bright-green leaves. There are buds where the stars chill them at night. Ebit, Mama’s orchids are alive. In a few weeks, the buds will sprout the loveliest of pink and light yellow. I will gently cut them and bring them to her grave.
The plants remember everything. They rest for a while and, later, when the season is right, they take on colors. The bright tones are their memories.
The walls and chairs and porches remember the sun, the light. They constantly tell us of a planet that spins for a year. The house is alive as well, standing on the ground that breathes and recalls the passing of people.
It is good to think of life as a throbbing time and a moving space. No one sits still in this world. When we wait for someone to pick us up, we are marked by this universe, this huge, boundless heart, this infinitesimal mind that thinks of love and more love, sometimes of regrets, but even these regrets disappear in the face of fate that allows only the recollection of good things.
There are flowers of the most delicate white outside the gate. Worms will eat their leaves tomorrow. The harsh rains will ruin their blooms, but we need not worry. Across the field, there are more of them, and they cannot be destroyed. Not even the thousand tiny birds can consume them. Memory will keep them blooming.
Beneath my feet, I sense grasses inching their way out. They will join all the greens of this earth we know. They, too, shall remember the soil from where they come and to where they will go home to. Memory shall keep them green for days and, when they turn brown and rot away, memory will surrender them to the ground, for that is the most proper way to express gratitude.
The ordinary day will have the lowly butterfly to remember its passing to night.
Out there in deep space, there will be no sun rising and setting. We need not worry, my dear little sister. In the morning, when I sit again by the porch, the butterfly of black and silver will spin around me. I will stand and embrace the air it has collected.
Nothingness has a mind and can, after all, remember.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano