Story Books

The sky is clear and the marine fog has burned off for the day revealing a fine, end of summer day. My sister and I talk on the phone as I gather a collection of children’s books I once read my own babies to pass on to another two year old.

I realize some are a bit too complex for Cella’s age, but know that she can look at the pictures and at some point, will want her mother to read every word on each page, possibly even twice. Her mother telling me she was growing tired of the small collection of board books she had, and I remembered the moments in years, both when the baby is chubby and sing-song and when the six year old won’t let go of your neck, most often picking the longest picture book he can possibly find and demanding you not skip an inch, that there is for the parent in bedtime stories, both an annoyance and the dearest of magic.

My sister was a nursing baby when I left home at sixteen, closer in age to my eldest son and as a child she would sleep over with my younger brother who was three months older than my son and so they were a pack of three and I, the older sister, also the mother. She is grown now, no children of her own, but a woman who lives several states away from both me and our parents’ home. We share letters and advice and hopes with one another. Yesterday, I shared with her a dream I’d had of a brown and white rat jumping across my chest as I crawled under the stairs at our old house, no light, close to a dirt-floored cave next to the fruit-room, which reeked of cat pee. She told me she’d had dark dreams too, of that place of our common house, separated by decades.

If thinking in Jungian terms, and the house does in fact represent different aspects of the psyche, then that spot in our childhood, so spine stiffening and suffocating, is the darkest, closed off and hidden room of our mind. And, Sarah tells me I can also use my brain to not delve so deep, she talks of our childhood Jesus and giving all over to him and I have read and tried the power of scriptures and positive-thoughts advice, but after another day of perfectly clear skies followed by a night of vigorous life-threatening walks along the icy-edged cliffs of my dreams, I see no way, prayers or wishful thinking to shoo the wolfish mentality of nighttime away?