As I put down the box made of a basket’s weave next to the space
where Baby Alex rests, an angel statue lays on its side with wings
cracked and small pieces nothing more than rocks found in a
mountain river base. Fissures outline the cheeks of the child
effigy. I remember why I walk in the footsteps of other
mothers’ shoes like a pair of sneakers that know mountain
trails for three years immediately after the rain. I recall why
as I arrange flowers fake and real at the cradles no one rocks,
and the beds in which no one tumbles into the right spot.
I sweep away the dirt that covers the sleeping angels’ names.
below the fractured figure, loose stones mix in the mud after
nights of winter rain. Alex’s resting place lays at the base of
the hill to the right of the bell tower and my daughter’s
sleeping beauty retreat on the crest.
As I know my girl who wears rain boots at
the age of two when we go to our hotel’s
swimming pool. Even in death, “grave,”
misses existence in her vocabulary.
I move the baby angel statue with its fissured hands. Sweep
away the stone and dirt until my eyes read Kevin Alexander
with Alex in quotation marks above. What love, I think of
his parents when they give him a nickname although he only
breathes for three days. The very quotations around his name
inspire me to place Corrie in quotations at the crest of her
marker because, even when she lived within and kicked my
ribs, John and I never call her Cora.
When Corrie starts her second year of
preschool, some women call her “Cora,”
three months in. She rolls her eyes to the
side as a child more precocious than a girl
in a commercial who catches her father deep
in the fridge at 2 a.m.
In the back of my mind as a I work on Alex’s space, I hear
people of the town of my husband’s birth ask me, “Do you
know God?” Such conversations, as Mimi, my grandmother,
had taught me, stay in privacy. I have questions of the
Maker in whom so many speak of magnificence for it
is not majesty, to me, when children’s feet leave the Earth.
I want to say, “Why my child?
Why any child?
Why must as many mothers’ and fathers’ footsteps
touch the grass of Mountain Rest as burials of
older men some legends hail as kings?”
I tell Corrie, “Tell them you go by ‘Corrie,’”
and she replies, “But Mommy, I don’t want
to talk back.” I roll my eyes at the number of times
she sticks out her lower lip when told to eat something
green after I say, “No,” to ice cream.
After I see Alex’s sweet name, I put the daisy yellow blossom and
one red, February flower in his vase. I spread rose petals
around his memorial for I’d give the world’s sleeping children
Egyptian tombs made for pharaohs. I cut off wire at the bottom
of my flowers, and I bend them. I secure them around
the base of a dual heart wreath, so it will stand. It leans up against
Alex’s hummingbird atop a garden stake. A green jewel sits at the
center of his chest.
“Corrie,” I say, “You have no problem making your
opinion known when you’re at home.” “I tell them,
Mommy,” she says turning those blue eyes with a
green jewel on me in the rearview mirror. “I’ll tell
them again: ‘My name’s Corrie.’” Her voice goes up
as if she sings the note of “mi.”
Questions of God sometimes stall me until I bring out what
beauty I make, or find in stores, so the children’s memorials
reflect the time of year without torn floral fabric. The sky with
sun for the first time in several days fades as a gray, I’d seen
from the coast below the white cliffs of Dover, retakes the sky.
From the clouds, a hawk dips not far above. My eyes stay upon
the sky in the same way I’d looked at Alex’s name. The hawk,
and its black wings, circle above the bell tower, Corrie’s
sleeping beauty retreat, Alex and me. Its wings draw rings
as it sweeps the sky. From my car close to Alex’s place, my
Mom rolls down her window and asks, “What’s wrong?”
I say, “Nothing is wrong. Do you see the hawk above us?”
I see Corrie giggle as she swings from tree
branch-to-branch with boughs thicker than
pipes below the ground. A bluegreen
hummingbird lands upon a lighter branch.
She wears a skirt with sparkles, leggings, and
rain boots even though a June sun shines through.
“I am so proud when I think of your ministry,” my mother
says, and I stop and think of my father. I recall what he means
to the church in which I’d grown up where he took a vacuum
from a closet in the back below the balcony, and cleaned the
carpets. Never in my mind could I equate myself in any
equality as people hold my parents. Tears come to her
eyes and she says, “I’m so proud of you. I’m so
proud of my daughter.”
I put the box made of a basket’s weave in my trunk,
look to the bell tower, and then at a Valentine’s Day
balloon where my daughter sleeps. It says, “I love you.”
Corrie's Season 