If memories and ideas keep coming back into your life, You know, an image, a notion, a worry that won’t mind its manners, that memory isn’t broken, it’s probably just knocking.
Now don’t get me wrong. I love a good fixing. I’ve fixed radios with butter knives and once repaired a wobbly chair with a ruler and sheer confidence. But some things aren’t asking to be fixed. They’re asking to be heard. And if you don’t listen, they get louder. Or stranger. Or they move into your toolbox and start shouting.
Which brings me to Mary.
Mary likes to pretend she’s in charge of things. Sweet girl. Very capable. Makes lists. Keeps calendars. Tries to train time like it’s a cooperative pet. It is not.
One June day, an absolutely shamelessly gorgeous June day, all green and blue and puffed-up white clouds like the sky was showing off, I told Mary I wanted a dress the color of that day. Not a sensible dress. A twirly one. A dress with opinions.
I could see it. Full skirt. Sunlight stitched right in. Maybe a little gold headband, just to be polite to the sun. (Whispering, tiara, what girl doesn’t love a tiara?)
Mary sighed.
That’s usually the sound she makes right before she puts me somewhere inconvenient.
Next thing I know, I’m in the diamond-plate toolbox in the back of her pickup, wedged between resentment and motor oil. Now listen, if you’ve never tried to have a meaningful creative conversation next to a leaky jug of 15W-40, I don’t recommend it.
She *said* that she wasn’t banishing me.
(She absolutely was.)
She was looking at nine more hours of driving some loud, dusty contraption … I forget its name, but it smelled like diesel and dust, and she wanted peace if not silence, because that Cumins engine was going to be her background music. What she got was me yelling that a summer-day dress would make everything better just before she fired up that engine.
She never made that dress (until just now). I brought it up from time to time. Because some ideas are patient, and some are persistent, and the good ones are usually both.
That day with the dress and the diesel was around the time Mary finally stopped pretending that her work was separate from her life. As if you can stack the pieces neatly and label them. Creative work doesn’t work like that. It’s one long conversation that you keep bumping into. Sometimes lovingly. Sometimes with a shopping cart.
She started paying attention then. Connecting things. Letting them talk to each other instead of shoving them in boxes.
Now, Fab World—that’s my house, obviously. Or Mary’s house, but properly improved. Same structure, better attitude. And in the garden … yes, garden, because calling it a yard is how nothing grows. In the garden there’s a big old maple tree.
Not a sugar maple. Don’t get excited. Just a regular, magnificent, stubborn old thing. Ninety years, give or take. Which means it won’t be around forever.
That’s the part people get quiet about. Mary and I are glad it’s here. We’re sad it won’t outlast us. Both thoughts can exist at the same time. So Mary did what she does. She brought that tree into her work. Not to explain it. Just to notice it while it’s still standing.
From my kitchen window—yes, my kitchen, with the radio that looks like the grill of a 1958 Hudson Hawk in shadowtone red, and a pink refrigerator that minds its own business I can see that tree. I sit there listening to the radio and watching time happen.
Now before you think I’m stuck in the 1950’s, let me assure you: I own a modern electronic corkboard. It’s right there on the fridge. Very advanced. Very bossy. It remembers things so I don’t have to.
It’s all very silly.
And very satisfying.
Mary says she uses Fab World to keep time and memory contained. I think she means she needs a place where things can exist without demanding conclusions. When memories get too loud, she puts them here with me. I keep an eye on them. I’m good at that.
Eventually Mary started wondering if everyone does this. Circles the same themes. Trips over the same ideas. Visits the same questions like old neighbors you don’t hate but don’t fully understand either. She used to think it meant she was stuck. I told her that was nonsense.
Some old psychologist fellow once said the mind sends you the same symbols until you actually invite them in. Not to rework them. Not to shrink them. Just to integrate them. Which is a fancy word for letting them sit at the table without an argument.
Mary liked that. Took it as permission to stop fixing herself and start listening.
Time, for instance. Mary and time have a complicated relationship. She once aged herself and her mother an entire year by accident. Told her mother the wrong age with such confidence that they both lived in the future for twelve months.
Now she keeps clocks everywhere. Calendars too. Because remembered time has a tendency to drift, and she prefers not to find herself in June when she was still living in May.
Her stories, her characters—me included—are how she stitches the inside time to the outside clocks. A negotiation. A truce.
Aging surprised her. It surprises most people. You think it’ll be louder or sadder or slower. Instead, it folds. Years stack themselves into moments. Old questions knock again, but differently dressed. She thought her memory was failing. It wasn’t. It was reorganizing.
People think memory is storage. Filing cabinets. Hard drives. Labels and accuracy. That’s not what it’s for. Memory is for coherence. We don’t remember what happened. We remember what mattered. That’s why certain images keep coming back. They’re still working.
That’s why my world is full of objects instead of explanations. A house. A radio. A corkboard. A tree. Things that don’t justify themselves. They just are. The maple tree doesn’t narrate. It stands there and lets time happen to it. That’s more than enough.
Mary finally understood that bringing memory into her work wasn’t about preserving the past. It was about letting the past walk alongside the present without grabbing the steering wheel.
And then there’s voice. Oh, voice comes back too. Not louder. Clearer.
Mary’s voice, my voice, the voices she borrows when she needs courage or distance. Some people argue. Some instruct. Mary narrates. She tells you where she is and lets you decide if you want to sit down for a minute.
I approve.
Voice disappears sometimes because life gets busy. It doesn’t leave. It waits. Aging gives the voices that make up the music of memory permission to sing again. To sing the songs that tell the truth as memory currently understands it.
Meaning works the same way. It doesn’t arrive with a trumpet. It shows up through repetition. Through showing up again and again without demanding a finale. Meaning isn’t an answer. It’s a direction. Or if you ask me, it’s the next step in a waltz.
That’s why Mary makes episodes instead of declarations. Check-ins instead of manifestos. Corkboards instead of conclusions. Attention is maintained, not finished. So if ideas keep returning in your life, it doesn’t mean you’re stuck. It means you’re practicing.
And practice is how meaning keeps its balance while everything else wobbles.
Darlings, before I let you go, I’ll say this. Look back in your memory. Don’t focus on the loud parts. Notice the memories that keep coming back quietly. Those memories might just be asking you to put on a dancin’ dress and twirl.
Now. Coffee’s still on, that old clock is still spinning. And thinking … well.
Thinking is always allowed.
Companion piece where I let Mary talk (Going live on Thursday January 15th): Blogger preview available now through this link: Mary on the YouTubes
