Long Term Memory

Inspirational song : Go Your Own Way (Fleetwood Mac)

I fed one of my addictions this week, when I went to the store for screws and paint. I have so little self control when bedding plants are in my line of vision, and I couldn't have kept myself from entering and exiting the store through the garden center if I had tried. I didn't try. The best I could do to keep a handle on my weakness was to focus on clearance plants. Foot tall plumbago plants in quart pots marked down to a dollar each? I'll take two. Twenty five percent off of little creeping Jenny plants? Two of those too. Half off of a large nandina? Oh, I'm starting to fill up, but maybe just one...

It took me until this afternoon to put the new plants into pots, mostly because I was so reluctant to step out on the deck to retrieve the last little bit of potting soil. There are now two of the large banana spiders blocking my path to the trash cans. Carlotta moved her web and tripled her living space, and apparently invited her little cousin to come set up shop in the apartment above her. I finally screwed up my courage and retrieved the bag of soil, and brought it in to fill up the spaces in the pots. I made another fantastic mess on the kitchen floor, but this time it was merely incidental to moving root balls around. The girls were visibly disappointed. They immediately recognized the offending bag of soil from a few weeks ago, and looked all around it, hoping for another palmetto bug to come out and scare the crap out of mommy. It amazes me how long cats' memories are. They knew exactly what had happened last time that particular green bag was inside, and they were ready to play. In my many years of being a crazy cat lady (and the mother of girls who moved off to college), I've had reason to separate off groups of cats, only to reunite them at later dates. When my older daughter went off to do field work one summer, she brought her two cats back to live with us for six weeks. We were stunned and moved when we watched the reunion between the sister cats (this is Cricket's sister), and the look on the gray cat's face when she saw Torden for the first time in years nearly made us cry. Even though we sent her up to college with a young tortie who loves her madly, the old girl always looked at me like she thought the rest of the Pride and I had abandoned her. It hurts my heart that she thinks that.

Being a nomad, I often have trouble remembering where I am. I couldn't begin to count how many times I've woken, and before my eyes are open, I really have to work to think which room I'm in, and how is it arranged. Sometimes when I do open my eyes and look, I'm surprised to see where the windows are, and what shape they are, or what color the walls are. The details of my houses are still imprinted on me deeply. If you don't think your surroundings matter so much, try taking a mirror down off a wall for a week. Just that one detail will mess with your whole sense of spatial awareness. For me, that is the part of moving that hurts the most. I know where things go, what color they are supposed to be, how each room sounds and smells, and when one piece of that puzzle changes, I feel a keen sense of loss as if we are already packing up the rental truck and leaving a phase of our lives behind. I struggled with that feeling when I sent the painting back for the career retrospective at the state capitol this summer, and I moved around two of my stepdad's paintings to fill the void.

Tonight I was driving, ruminating on the girl cats' reactions to the potting soil, and what an obvious indicator of their memories it was, when a song came on the radio. Two or three strums of a guitar, and I was in fifth grade again, sitting in the back of our language arts class, where we were allowed to go once all of our classwork was done. The teacher had recorded a handful of songs, and once our assignments were complete, we went back to the table with the tape player, and we could sit with headphones on, listening to music, while the rest of the class finished up. There are incredibly important moments of my life, things I really should remember, that I couldn't recall under threat of death. But three seconds into a Fleetwood Mac song, and I can remember sitting across from the boy I had the biggest crush on, talking excitedly with him about how my mother was taking me to see the upcoming Shaun Cassidy concert. Maybe if calculus class had had a soundtrack, more of that would have imprinted in my brain. Anything would have helped.