Scattered thoughts

A decade ago I scattered my mother’s ashes in Trail Creek, north of Ketchum, Idaho. As best as I can recall, this is the spot I sent her into the river, though it’s hard to be sure. I scattered her ashes in winter, and trout streams wear different faces in winter, snow and ice blanket and blur the distinctive curves and dips of their banks, half-frozen water changes the way the river runs, makes narrow what in summer is broad. But I think this is the spot – I remember that tree. I chose it because of that tree, because of the way the creek was slowly undercutting the bank there and carving a deep pool that in the summer would be shaded and in the autumn would be rich with rotting detritus. I chose it because I was trained to look at rivers with a fisherman’s eye and because when I saw that spot with the water undercutting the bank, changing what thought itself to be unchangeable, my heart said yes and my feet said stay.

So I scattered my mothers ashes in the winter chill, and with them I scattered the ashes of a letter I had written to her, a letter closing the conversation we never really had, a letter I burnt right there on the banks of Trail Creek. I scattered all my disappointment, all my anger – much justified, some not – all my self-pity and all my unfinished business. All the unsaid things, kind and unkind, I put in that letter, burnt to ash and sent downstream.

My mother was deeply, deeply flawed – alcoholic, in all likelihood self-medicating a very real depression; bitter and unhappy and incapable of watching happiness unfold its butterfly wings in her presence. I have pictures of her from an earlier time and she looks happy, but I do not know that woman. By the time I was growing up my mother was a storm cloud and the least little thing could seed her to rain. I learned to hide, to shrink and avoid, to keep my voice low – to this day R can’t hear something I say almost daily, and I am even quieter in German – and to head for the barn when I saw storm clouds gathering. But I have pictures of her from an earlier time and she is smiling, at Warm Springs, Idaho, she is smiling and oh! in one or two of these pictures she is lovely. Her loveliness surprises me; I did not know that woman, either. I do not know what happened to that woman, where she went, or why.

My mother should not, probably, have had children; or she should only have had one, being my older brother, so that I evaporate from this story like invisible ink leaving not a trace on the page. We overwhelmed her limited resources, the alcoholic daughter of an alcoholic mother. We were too much. I, the second child, was too much. I am hyper-aware of this as I wait to find out if I am pregnant, hyper-aware of my status as the second child of a woman who had one child too many, hyper-aware of my own shortcomings as a mother.

But I have scattered these thoughts already. I wrote this and said this to the winter air and burned this and scattered this in Trail Creek a decade ago. I have scattered all of this. But today is my mother’s birthday, my flawed, wounded, hurtful, hurting, overwhelmed mother’s birthday and I am waiting to find out if I am pregnant with my second child and out of the corner of my eye here in the clean Swiss wind I see ashes swirling where they should not be swirling.

I sent this downstream a long time ago, to slowly settle among the river rocks beneath the cottonwoods. Didn't I?