Visiting Josephine

A memory is a physical place.

A place I once was and can never revisit physically.  It never happens again.  I remember my grandmother Josephine as I often do.  But this time I come to the realization that she will only ever be a memory.  She will only exist for me and the people who knew her.  For the ones who never knew her, she does not physically exist.  There are many iterations of her but they exist only in our imaginations.  Mum digging a hole on a rainy day at the river before planting yams.  Mum holding my hand on the way to Sunday mass,  I’m wearing white fake patent leather shoes and lacy socks.  There is a constant fear of falling on the pavement, goats at the side of the road, mango trees observing.  And what of now?  This day in New York?  This mango tree may not exist any more, only in my memory.  And my Mum?  My Mum, how I miss the physicality of her.  Her scolding voice, her strong abrasive love, the almost diabolical twinkle in her eyes, her cunning and whit. She exists every day in my head.  But I can never go back to the river and pick oranges with her ever again.  I can almost smell the rain, the dry rotted leaves, the castor oil mixed with the sweat in her jet-black curly Afro-Carib-Euro hair.  I can almost feel her bony hands squeezing my arm just above the elbow.  Child!  She called us Child.  It was meant for us to understand that we were to listen to her because she had already lived.  She had already gotten a great understanding of the world.  We had not.  It was not meant to make us feel small or less our selves.  It was a form of protection, “ti mamai” or little person.  You are a little individual and I am here to be your guide little person, ti mamai.

And where are you now?  You are all over my imagination still holding, grabbing my arms.  I am no longer a little person, I’ve grown into a big person or a “grand moun” I sit beneath the mango tree with you on the river stones and I speak to you, me as a big person you an ancient, me you and the tree.  For me the tree is time itself.  That mango tree which has previously resurfaced in another of my fictitious memories one with my own mother, your daughter and yet in that memory my mother is the tree.  So now there is the three of us.  Me, you and Joan the mango tree.  Joan stands tall between us.  Like this the two of us sit beneath her ancient branches watching the river roll by.