Ephemera in Five Parts
by Lucinda Cummings
Papers
Notebooks and journals, sketchbooks and stationery, notecards, scrapbooking paper, papers with lines, grids, and dots occupy my house.
I began collecting papers when I was three, pulling from wastebaskets every piece of junk mail, every
sheet of paper with words I was just learning to read. Gathering them into piles that I picked up in my
small hands, clunking the page bottoms against a tabletop to line them up in a perfect satisfying stack.
Pushing my papers across the carpet in a cardboard box, pretending to go door-to-door, selling “preferences.” I didn’t know what preferences were, but borrowed the word to name my papers because I liked its sound. One day I found a pile of cancelled checks in the trash after Daddy paid the bills. I marched outside to Mama, who was hanging sheets on the line. Tripping, falling, the checks flew out of my hands, blanketing the back yard with green paper. “Pick those up right now! I don’t want everybody knowing our business!” The heat in my chest, my earliest memory of shame, both hers and mine.
“For Sale House Papers:” my son Benjamin’s words for the one-sheet handouts we found in plastic boxes mounted atop “For Sale” signs in our neighborhood the summer he was four. Newborn Sam in the stroller, I walked to shed baby weight and entertain my ever-restless firstborn. When we spotted a new sign down the block, Benjamin ran toward it, then waited for me to reach up and retrieve the new addition to his collection. He brought the papers home to look at the photos, listen to me read the strange language, giggle at the idea of a square foot.
Notebooks and journals, sketchbooks and stationery, notecards, scrapbooking paper, papers with lines, grids, and dots occupy my house.
I began collecting papers when I was three, pulling from wastebaskets every piece of junk mail, every
sheet of paper with words I was just learning to read. Gathering them into piles that I picked up in my
small hands, clunking the page bottoms against a tabletop to line them up in a perfect satisfying stack.
Pushing my papers across the carpet in a cardboard box, pretending to go door-to-door, selling “preferences.” I didn’t know what preferences were, but borrowed the word to name my papers because I liked its sound. One day I found a pile of cancelled checks in the trash after Daddy paid the bills. I marched outside to Mama, who was hanging sheets on the line. Tripping, falling, the checks flew out of my hands, blanketing the back yard with green paper. “Pick those up right now! I don’t want everybody knowing our business!” The heat in my chest, my earliest memory of shame, both hers and mine.
“For Sale House Papers:” my son Benjamin’s words for the one-sheet handouts we found in plastic boxes mounted atop “For Sale” signs in our neighborhood the summer he was four. Newborn Sam in the stroller, I walked to shed baby weight and entertain my ever-restless firstborn. When we spotted a new sign down the block, Benjamin ran toward it, then waited for me to reach up and retrieve the new addition to his collection. He brought the papers home to look at the photos, listen to me read the strange language, giggle at the idea of a square foot.
~
Fabric
In the South of my 1950s childhood, we called it “material.” Hancock was a fabric store, but what they sold was material.
Grandmother laid out the material on her round kitchen table, a beige hopsacking, loosely woven and soft. She showed me how to pin on the brown tissue paper pattern pieces, having volunteered to teach me how to sew a skirt for myself. Mama sewed, but her constant swearing at the machine made her a poor teacher. At each step, after Grandmother explained what to do, I talked her into doing it for me. No confidence to practice something new in front of someone else, even my adoring grandmother. And what if it didn’t turn out perfectly?
In a fabric store, material calls out to me, begging to be touched and stroked, its colors admired. I run my hand along the soft wales of thick cranberry corduroy, inhale the scent of new cotton, feel the “hand” of blue wool, touch the ivory shell buttons arrayed on their cards in rows.
Old cotton sheets, endlessly washed, bring perfect rest. The kind that start out stiff and sturdy, a high thread count, and soften over years into worn white cotton with a velvet finish. Cotton that cools your cheek as you lay your head down for the night.
My Benjamin was buried at twenty-three in a white cotton shroud made from a discarded bedsheet. Volunteers from our synagogue’s burial society sew shrouds for the deceased of our congregation, sending them out of this life wrapped in ancient tradition. They performed a ritual cleansing of Benjamin’s body, accompanied by sacred prayers, then dressed him in his shroud and the silk prayer shawl from his bar mitzvah, and gently laid him in his plain pine coffin. They sat with him around the clock until it was time for his burial. A gift that can never be reciprocated.
In the South of my 1950s childhood, we called it “material.” Hancock was a fabric store, but what they sold was material.
Grandmother laid out the material on her round kitchen table, a beige hopsacking, loosely woven and soft. She showed me how to pin on the brown tissue paper pattern pieces, having volunteered to teach me how to sew a skirt for myself. Mama sewed, but her constant swearing at the machine made her a poor teacher. At each step, after Grandmother explained what to do, I talked her into doing it for me. No confidence to practice something new in front of someone else, even my adoring grandmother. And what if it didn’t turn out perfectly?
In a fabric store, material calls out to me, begging to be touched and stroked, its colors admired. I run my hand along the soft wales of thick cranberry corduroy, inhale the scent of new cotton, feel the “hand” of blue wool, touch the ivory shell buttons arrayed on their cards in rows.
Old cotton sheets, endlessly washed, bring perfect rest. The kind that start out stiff and sturdy, a high thread count, and soften over years into worn white cotton with a velvet finish. Cotton that cools your cheek as you lay your head down for the night.
My Benjamin was buried at twenty-three in a white cotton shroud made from a discarded bedsheet. Volunteers from our synagogue’s burial society sew shrouds for the deceased of our congregation, sending them out of this life wrapped in ancient tradition. They performed a ritual cleansing of Benjamin’s body, accompanied by sacred prayers, then dressed him in his shroud and the silk prayer shawl from his bar mitzvah, and gently laid him in his plain pine coffin. They sat with him around the clock until it was time for his burial. A gift that can never be reciprocated.
~
Light
Major depression kept Mama in bed, every shade drawn. Undoing the legacy of darkness she left, I crave sunlight, renting an office because of its sun filled, south facing windows, painting its walls a soft yellow.
Every Labor Day, I begin my morning vigil of sitting in front of my SAD light, storing up sunlight to survive a Minnesota winter. Dread comes as the days grow shorter and the sun sits lower in the sky. I celebrate at Winter Solstice, knowing that the waning light has reversed its flow and daylight will increase again.
My English name means “light,” as does my Hebrew name, “Liora.” Perhaps I’m part bear, meant to curl up in my leaf-filled den and sleep through the darkness.
On the day Benjamin died, the gray sky descended and dark rushed early at the windowpanes. One golden light had gone out of our lives. We huddled together in the blackness, afraid of sleep.
Major depression kept Mama in bed, every shade drawn. Undoing the legacy of darkness she left, I crave sunlight, renting an office because of its sun filled, south facing windows, painting its walls a soft yellow.
Every Labor Day, I begin my morning vigil of sitting in front of my SAD light, storing up sunlight to survive a Minnesota winter. Dread comes as the days grow shorter and the sun sits lower in the sky. I celebrate at Winter Solstice, knowing that the waning light has reversed its flow and daylight will increase again.
My English name means “light,” as does my Hebrew name, “Liora.” Perhaps I’m part bear, meant to curl up in my leaf-filled den and sleep through the darkness.
On the day Benjamin died, the gray sky descended and dark rushed early at the windowpanes. One golden light had gone out of our lives. We huddled together in the blackness, afraid of sleep.
~
Blanket
Tucked into my knitting bag, a wool blanket I’m making, and skeins of yarn in sky blue, green, creamy white, and charcoal. More the size of a miniskirt than something one might curl up under, it’s been in progress for years. I see now that I bought the yarn because it was fall and my hands loved its scratchy warmth. I knit to feel the yarn again, not for the finished product.
For weeks after my son died on a freezing January day, blankets filled every room of our house. Sam and I sat watching movies to get through those unbearable days, wrapped in quilts I’d made. Bob turned up the heat and walked around with a knitted blanket over his shoulders. We could not get warm.
Walking away from Benjamin’s grave on the day we buried him, the cold air stung our faces and the wind was merciless at our backs. Nancy walked toward us with a snowy white blanket in her arms. Opening it wide, she placed it around my shoulders, saying simply, “I want you to have this.” Pure cashmere, it was the most elegant blanket I’d ever seen or felt. I wanted to insist that she keep it for herself, but words would not come, as I trudged the rest of the way to the funeral home’s black limousine, Bob and Sam beside me. Inside the car, the heat blasted as we drove away, but it would be months before I felt warm again. In the spring, I returned the cashmere blanket to Nancy, but her gift stays with me.
Tucked into my knitting bag, a wool blanket I’m making, and skeins of yarn in sky blue, green, creamy white, and charcoal. More the size of a miniskirt than something one might curl up under, it’s been in progress for years. I see now that I bought the yarn because it was fall and my hands loved its scratchy warmth. I knit to feel the yarn again, not for the finished product.
For weeks after my son died on a freezing January day, blankets filled every room of our house. Sam and I sat watching movies to get through those unbearable days, wrapped in quilts I’d made. Bob turned up the heat and walked around with a knitted blanket over his shoulders. We could not get warm.
Walking away from Benjamin’s grave on the day we buried him, the cold air stung our faces and the wind was merciless at our backs. Nancy walked toward us with a snowy white blanket in her arms. Opening it wide, she placed it around my shoulders, saying simply, “I want you to have this.” Pure cashmere, it was the most elegant blanket I’d ever seen or felt. I wanted to insist that she keep it for herself, but words would not come, as I trudged the rest of the way to the funeral home’s black limousine, Bob and Sam beside me. Inside the car, the heat blasted as we drove away, but it would be months before I felt warm again. In the spring, I returned the cashmere blanket to Nancy, but her gift stays with me.
~
Star
The pride I felt in grade school when I figured out how to draw a perfect star. Drawing stars all over our unfinished basement walls with my purple magic marker, the one I’d saved up 50¢ to buy at the dime store, choosing purple because I thought it was a sad, left out color; because no one I knew claimed purple as their favorite.
A silver necklace with a petite marcasite Star of David hanging from its chain, given to me by four-year-old Benjamin (with a little help from Grandma) on the day that he and I entered the mikveh for our conversion to Judaism.
Indigo sky filled with silver stars: a motif in my quilts and watercolor paintings.
Standing outside at night, I talk to Benjamin among the stars. Why does a starry night bring him close? Maybe some childhood idea I had of heaven, situated among the stars, or the sense of infinity that arises in my chest when I look up from the dark earth. Or Benjamin’s fascination with stars and planets as a young child. I talk to him in other places, driving or sitting in his room, but I find him most easily, late at night, in a star-strewn sky. I like to think of him in the world to come, a burst of light and energy, streaking across the dark universe
The pride I felt in grade school when I figured out how to draw a perfect star. Drawing stars all over our unfinished basement walls with my purple magic marker, the one I’d saved up 50¢ to buy at the dime store, choosing purple because I thought it was a sad, left out color; because no one I knew claimed purple as their favorite.
A silver necklace with a petite marcasite Star of David hanging from its chain, given to me by four-year-old Benjamin (with a little help from Grandma) on the day that he and I entered the mikveh for our conversion to Judaism.
Indigo sky filled with silver stars: a motif in my quilts and watercolor paintings.
Standing outside at night, I talk to Benjamin among the stars. Why does a starry night bring him close? Maybe some childhood idea I had of heaven, situated among the stars, or the sense of infinity that arises in my chest when I look up from the dark earth. Or Benjamin’s fascination with stars and planets as a young child. I talk to him in other places, driving or sitting in his room, but I find him most easily, late at night, in a star-strewn sky. I like to think of him in the world to come, a burst of light and energy, streaking across the dark universe
Lucinda Cummings is a writer and clinical psychologist who lives in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus, Woven Tale Press, and other publications. She is working on a memoir about finding home. Visit her website at: www.lucindathewriter.com
A 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, Lucinda's essay can be found in Issue 23 of Glassworks.
