A Memoir by Angela Townsend

My mother taught me to look for sticks shaped like the letter Y. No one taught her this, unless we count the Holy Spirit, who is always busy in the branches.

My mother did not learn this in Brooklyn. Not even dawn could decorate the wall outside her window. But the little girl saw more than geometry in the bricks, fingering rectangles until she felt a pulse. She smelled the sea and let it make mischief with her hair. She learned to roll her curls in cola cans to shush the frizz. 

My mother did not learn this from my grandmother, although Sicily’s daughter was a tree. In a deforested borough, mother and daughter turned flour and butter into buds. The honey balls, struffoli, burst like Eden in the mouths of aunts and uncles. Christmas came in time every year. There were no jewels in the tinsel, but figs and walnuts made little bracelets, cuccidati. They called each other “my breath,” ciada mia, and lived like queens.

My mother did not learn this from my father, the bench scientist who blew his own cover. His summaries wore garlands and gardenias. He was infatuated with adverbs and existence. The advertising department plucked him, and he grew. My parents played backgammon on the train and read T.S. Eliot out loud.

My mother did not learn this from me. I told every living thing at the Little Red Schoolhouse that my mother made my overalls! I rubbed the iron-on kitten like a Miraculous Medal. I wailed like a widow when grass tattooed my knees. I learned the psalm of  “That’s why we have washing machines,” my mother’s alto restringing my peace. I stepped gently to keep my shoelaces white.  

My mother did not leash her expectations in the suburbs. She conducted experiments. Bare sticks could be talked into springtime. The shrub outside the window was my mother’s co-conspirator in scrambling the calendar. My father brought home consistories of pink Valentine bears, and my mother “forced the forsythia” until yellow wands outwitted winter. 

My mother did not permit me to mortgage my body. We read about salamander sociology, then crawled down our spines to the creek. She took Field Natural History and placed woolly bear caterpillars on my fingers after piano lessons. She tilted my chin so I would not miss the hawk’s flap-flap-glide. She led the Girl Scout troop into a campground that smelled like egg salad, declaring a grand adventure and commanding us to dance to Whitney Houston until she could start a fire.

My mother did not show fear when the pediatrician took down the star. It could have been leukemia. It was Type 1 diabetes. We would practice injections on the stuffed bears. We would make jaunty men from syringe caps and hot glue. We would make Sweet n’ Low cookies shaped like starships. We would accept that God put this “in my book,” and we would “dance while the music is playing.” We would adopt a cat the color of a syringe cap and name him Fig Newton, and my father would call him “my good red man.” We would weep in the guest room bed when all the right things did not work, and we would get up again.

My mother did not let me stay inside. She packed glucose tablets and listed twenty-six items we had to find in Orange County Park before we could come home. We found “something yellow” and “something wiggly” and “something as fuzzy as Mommy’s hair.” We ate peanut butter crackers sitting on the cleanest log I could find. We talked about insulin pumps and my favorite boy in class, Pete. We got back up. 

My mother had her back to me when I saw her kneel. My mother knelt, and then my mother spun like a butterfly.

“YES!”

She was holding a twig no longer than a pencil, shaped like the letter Y.

She pressed it into my hand. “This is a yes stick.”

She closed my fingers around its trunk. “We will look for these everywhere. We must. When we find them, we will remember.” She raised her brows. The sun turned her eyes the color of figs. They usually looked like the herbal tea that filled our bellies when my blood glucose was too high for me to be allowed to eat.

“Yes to life. Yes to God. Yes, we are on the right track.” 

“Yes.”

We found them everywhere. We gathered them in jars and decorated them with glitter. I brought one to Pete and tried to explain. I stuck them in my ponytail when I found them on the playground. We held them like tuning forks until the music started playing. We still call each other when we find one outside the grocery store, or dropped like a fledgling on the sidewalk. 

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Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Pleiades, Terrain.org, and The Westchester Review, among others. She is a Best Spiritual Literature nominee.