In Memory

I have been meaning to blog about this for about a week now, so I guess I will finally get down to it...
A memory keeps coming back to me, prompted by the day in class when Sexson was talking to Lisa of the Little Legs about a childhood memory still logged in her subconscious. She talked about her best friend, Katey Crystal, and what she was wearing on a specific day... a happy day. That day in class, I thought about Lily, and have since been thinking about her probably every other day. I guess reading the name 'Lily' over and over again in 'To the Lighthouse' does something for the memory, too.

Lily was my best childhood friend. She lived right across the way, about two backyard spans and an alley's width away from my house, and when I was five years old I spent every waking minute with her. For some reason, this memory out of all my childhood memories is one that remains most clear in my head. I remember when I met her... I thought she was beautiful. She looked like a little pixie... very tiny with short, choppy bleach blonde hair and blue blue eyes. She was always smiling, always very friendly, and the most adventurous spirit I had met outside my own family. Lily was six and in kindergarten (I wasn't old enough to go), so I would wait during the week until she was out of class for our adventures to begin. I have about four or five very specific memories of her that I probably will never forget.

She went on a road trip with her family to California, I think, and ended up coming back with this enormous turtle. Apparently their dog found the turtle injured on the beach and Lily just couldn't part with it. Her dad was a biology teacher and they cared for the turtle and nursed it back to health. I think when she ended up moving away they still had it... I remember her compassion. At age 5, I remember her compassion. That seems so strange to me, but I don't think we can ever know what will touch us and what will stay with us, or at what capacity we can consider things at different ages.

I also have a memory of hurting her. We each got a pair of scissors from my moms house and decided we were going to cut the grass on the front lawn ourselves. The grass was pretty tall and as we were going along busily cutting everything up, I accidentally chopped into her finger. I remember her bleeding and running home and how bad I felt about hurting my friend. Not sure why that's still logged in the memory, but it is.

Another memory, my most fond, is of her all in white. Lily and I used to take 'naps' together if our parents would let us. I remember being under white covers and laughing and laughing with her. She was, perhaps, the first woman I ever fell in love with ha ha :). Mostly, though, her mother made her come home for naps, and I would have to take that time to find something else to do. One day I ran over to her house to see if she wanted to play, unaware that it was 'nap time'. It was very strange, but her mom asked me if I wanted to come in and look at her while she was sleeping. She said she looked like an angel and if I wanted to peak in, I could. I went to Lily's room and I remember very specifically the way she was positioned. She was lying directly in the middle of the bed with the comforter pulled up to her rib cage and her arms resting on top. She was wearing white and the comforter was white and she was surrounded by white stuffed animals. They were resting on her sides and all around her head. She looked like she was something in a shrine or some sort of mummy. Now, when I think about this experience, I am a bit put off by it, but then I just remember looking at her and thinking she was an angel. At that moment, in my five-year-old head, I thought we would surely be together forever. I really did love her.

Of course, life happened and Lily moved away with her family. Her mom got a job in the Flathead and she disappeared. We tried to keep in touch, but that faded away. She wrote me once when I was in junior high school and sent me pictures... she was so vastly different at that point that it made me sad, because I still had this image of the little pixie haired angel in all white. This reminds me of the 'life in death' situation I blogged about last time, because people go through little 'deaths' all their lives. Birth exists and death exists, but there is also the death of a past life, a stripping away of who we used to be and accepting and growing into who we become (and this happens several times in one lifetime). I had to deal with the death of my old friend and try to adjust to the new, and I was unable to do it. Actually, I haven't had contact with Lily in over 10 years and probably never will again. It's funny how someone so logged in my memory can be so absent from my life.

Next up...blogging about the BIG picture... has Virginia Woolf shown me how to live and what to do?