I Will Put My House in Order

M. Christine Benner Dixon

The prettiest of Grammy’s dishes broke in the move back to Pittsburgh. It was bundled in brown paper, but paper could not absorb the kinetic jolts of the road. I heard the loss before I saw it--the green shards of glass ringing like tiny bells in the box. It was not expensive--none of her things were expensive--but I had used it in her memory; every time I filled the bowl or washed it, it was always her bowl. And when it broke, it was hers.

I am the keeper of mundane heirlooms. My house is a cornucopia of unimportant family memories: open any cupboard door, and some pebble of nostalgia will roll off the shelf at you. Even as a child, I would protest if my mother tried to get rid of anything that carried the slightest whiff of someone I loved. The rattan peacock chair, which had served as a throne for every family birthday celebration for as long as I could remember, was falling to pieces by the time she decided to burn it. I wept over the ashes like Lorca wept for his friend Ignacio, gored by a bull. I pulled charred sticks from the fire and kept them. I still have them somewhere. As a result, I have acquired not the glittering spoils of inheritance--monument to some accomplished progenitor--but the scene dressing of the past, the minor trappings of my grandmothers' daily lives: bowls, pins, books, and the like.

It is right to have the possessions of my grandmothers about me. I am an osmotic vessel. If I keep the concentration of their memory high enough outside of my body, then it will not dissipate from within me into the air. I mix cookie dough in a yellow Pyrex bowl that my father gave me years after his mother died. It is not as lovely as the green glass bowl that broke in the move, but it is more invested with her touch. Her Mennonite faith taught her simplicity and frugality--her pretty things were generally kept modestly away, saved. The dough is rolled out, and I lean the heels of my hands on the cookie cutters from my mother's mother, my Grandma. She rummaged through them every Saturday, pulling out a sailboat, an angelfish, a seashell to make cookies for the Sunday School classes at Seymour United Methodist church. I feel the precise crunch of the tin's cutting edge against the sugar in the dough. I wiggle the shape on the floured counter, just enough to be sure it is cut through. I am shadowing Grandma’s movements years after she last made them, aware that I am not the first in this line of grandmothers, though I am the last. I am not a grandmother. I never will be.

My sister and I visited Värmland, Sweden, several years ago to walk in the places our grandmother's mother and her mothers and grandmothers walked. We spent a beautiful afternoon at the house where our great-grandmother lived before her father sent for her from America. Watching my sister run through the descendants of flowers that bent under our great-grandmother's feet, I was overcome with the strange fantasy of wanting to be buried there. I am sure the kind-eyed Swedish farmer whose land this now is would hardly welcome my American corpse as a natural part of his planting, but I longed for it. I wonder, though, if it was just memory pointed in the wrong direction, if this was my past remembering me. My body did lie there, in that land; it lies there still in quiet repose. The bees gather pollen from the bellflowers and the lupines above.

Parents talk reverentially of their children's lives. In the same breath as their complaints over fickle toddler appetites and teenaged morosity, they swear that they can't imagine life without them, how they would die or kill or cheat or any wild thing to mitigate a threat to the life of their child. I do not doubt the sincerity of this elemental and violent love, but statements like these create a comic theater of parental protectiveness in my imagination. The parent, seeing their child in the path of an oncoming bus, rushes to sacrifice themselves in place of the child, only to be caught up short by their own mother, wholly and blindly devoted to her child's survival. The grandmother, of course, has a father, and now a tottering old coot elbows his way in and faces down the roaring bus. But his life is deemed precious by his parents, and they crawl from their graves to intervene. And so on. A line of devoted parents count themselves as adjunct to their children's lives, conduits for the furtherance of the family line.

And this makes me wonder about myself, who has no wide-eyed child to defend against the proverbial (and curiously reckless) bus. Is it for me that the parade of self-sacrificing ancestors shoved their way in front of danger? I guess it must be, but I am no more the epitome of my line, the fulfillment of the promise of a thousand lives, than anyone is. My life is neither of lesser nor greater purpose because I do not have a child. Your life is neither of lesser nor greater purpose if you do have one. My grandmothers designed houses and cleaned churches and wrote poetry and made cookies not to summon me but because Grandma’s hands had structures in them and Grammy’s heart housed an earnest, practical, lyrical piety, and they loved the warm breath from the oven on their faces when they turned the trays.

I will not have a child and no grandchild; no one will ever say these things of me. So I turn the anticipation of my line backward. Because the ovum that would become the embryo that would become me was nested in my mother's and grandmother's bodies, I turn back to contain them both. I wait expectantly to age into their bodies' prophecies.

Grandma kept a resolution magneted to her refrigerator: I will put my house in order in 1998. This date is crossed out: 1999. This, too, crossed out: 2000. 2001. 2002. 2003. She could never seem to order her house. I can. Because mine has an end. From there, I work backwards. I write the family figures on the page and add and subtract, working out the long division in its beautiful trailing lines.

My grandmother drew the plans for my mother’s house, and I redraw that house in a poem and put my mother in it. She will inhabit the house my grandmother and I built together forever. When I make the Thanksgiving finger rolls in the kitchen that my mother inhabits and my grandmother designed, I use the recipe of my Grandma's mother who came from Sweden, which was given to her by her mother. I feed their memories to my family in sweet, twisted rounds of bread and poetry. All I have to give is that which was given to me. When the other children complained that she never had to speak in class, the teacher said of the girl who was not yet my grandmother, "Mary speaks with her pen." I use her pen now to outline speeches which I will deliver in lieu of children. My mouth, my hands, and reams of paper are filling with them. They overflow the bowl.

But paper cannot absorb the kinetic jolts of the road, and neither can my words, though I pack them densely in. The dish will shatter into golden bells. I will be carefully transferred to the earth, far from the lupines. This will be the end. My grandmother’s house will be in order. We are not lost, having been broken. We are what we have always been: our grandmothers' granddaughters, long buried and newly hoped for. We are cut glass handed down. We are memories turned backward.

M. Christine Benner Dixon is a scholar, writer, and communication consultant living in Pittsburgh, PA. Her writing has appeared in Paperbark Literary Magazine, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, American Literary Realism, DreamSeeker Magazine, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette