Memory Press

A mother's momento of remembrance

Memory Press

That glorious day by the river, shimmering in the late August light.
If I could ever press a memory, that would be the one.
I’d gently scoop it up in my hands, admiring its effortless majesty,
Intent on capturing and preserving its many dimensions:
The sound of your squeals and giggles,
The glittering speckles of river rocks catching light,
The neon colored nets, waving about in a wild fury,
as little fingers explore Grandpa Crayfish with fear and wonder.

I’d somehow feverishly scrape up
that living nostalgia a mother
always lives,
The bursting open of a heart as it sits
between heaven and earth,
knowing these pauses in time are
holy and soon passing.

That you’ll never again chase the thrill of the river catch
With 5-year-old hands and 2-year-old legs,
And the lime green hand cast of your best friend who
Is dumping a collection of crayfish and frogs
into a fluorescent green bucket of gold.

I try to squeeze my eyes shut,
listen to the vibrations of sound that fill up
The page of my memory press;
Breathe in deeply the smells of wet woodland around me;
anything to imprint this vignette.

Should I take a picture? Record a video?
I start panicking as I realize that this moment will never be
full of its nuance again.
For what can a picture truly contain?
Or written memory fully encapsulate?

But I still desperately seek to press and squeeze out
every bit of life onto the page,
Wishing and hoping that if I am careful enough,
diligent enough, delicate enough,
I can freeze this moment in time, making
a part of me immortal;
The part of me that contains you both.
And your glee-filled joy, and your “you-ness,”
that is so divine this day.

I know as time goes on, the colors will get more muted.
Some pieces will crack and break off.
The former juice of life & glory
reduced to a dry remnant.

But my mother’s heart will always tabernacle the
impression of what it was like to pick this memory,
to scoop it up with greedy-like delight, and hold it in my
fullness of body, with the fullness of time.

My little ones, I press this memory into my life:
For you.
For me.
And for the One who remembers all things.

---

Composition notes:

My journals are littered with pressings of flora admired through the years. An alpine flower here, a Boundary Waters maple leaf there, the very first ‘forget-me-nots’ my daughter picked for my son when he was only a few weeks old... I’ve always pressed these little treasures of glory with a hunger for trying to capture the liminal thing that (I know) can never be contained. For some reason, pressing has always soothed my aching-for-heaven self, that “while all things are passing, God never changes.” True beauty in this life gets to come with us into the next, and while now we can only see and behold it dimly, then we will know it in full.

A few months ago, my writing circle was given the prompt of “memory press” for a free-writing challenge. With the twenty-minute timer set, I found myself catapulted to an afternoon late last August, when the sun was finally starting to let off of us a bit, but the days were still splendidly warm with accompanying hints of the cool end drawing near. As I started writing, I almost fell into a trance-like state, pulled directly back into the awe and wonder and emotions of the scene that day; my love of the beauty of the mighty river and my children playing within it, my joy as they roared with an ecstasy that can only come from pure childlike freedom, my deep sadness at the soon and quick passing of its holy potency, my honor in being one of the few souls to behold and bear witness to it, my fervent desire to remember it.

What aided my writing was that I happened to have an old journal next to me that I hadn’t opened in some time. Gently rifling through its pages, I found my entry with a few alpine flowers I had hastily tucked away while hiking through the glory of the Swiss Alps in 2019 — its physical talisman of a pressed “memory” instantly brought me back to the experience of deep burning leg muscles hiking up a pined mountain forest; the icy refreshment of drinking from a sacred mountain stream; the “never getting over this” awestruck wonder at magnificent surrounding peaks. Even though the “grass withers and the flowers fade,” these little presses help me believe that the beauty and truth of God, the Word, the Logos, will stand forever.

So we press what we can; we remember, remember, remember. We live into the living nostalgia of motherhood and life with our beloveds — for it is in our remembering that we wake up from the numbing slumber of inattentive lives and join the Holy One in seeing things as they truly are, as we truly are. It is in remembering that we look at the content and matter of our lives with responsible dignity, and better yet, declare that the lives we live as resurrection people are not merely platonic, material events that transpire and are forever lost to time, but are lives and moments forever etched into the memory of God — holy and broken, worthy of recognition, repentance, and thanksgiving.

Praise be to the One who remembers all of Creation and etches each of us into His holy memory, forevermore.