Ann Ferro: More than the sum of our parts

I treasure what is by now a very shabby prayer book that my mother gave me for my First Communion so many years ago. The recessed area inside the front cover displays a tiny mother-of- pearl cross. I loved that book, holding it in my white gloved child’s hand, it was the epitome of beauty … and now? I am, with it in my wrinkled and spotted hands, a child with a child’s faith for a fleeting moment. It was and is me.
Isn’t it amazing how we are all bits and pieces of our lived lives, a kind of patchwork of people and things and smells and sounds and passing images?
Our house on 55th St. had its own energy, its hundred-year history of all those who had lived there before we lived there. When I walked in the front door, I was greeted with the scents of accumulated breakfasts, lunches, dinners, birthday celebrations, the joys and sadnesses of life that left a lingering aroma that meant home. Was it made of the once gas-lit plaster walls, the kitchen stove that was wood fired, the smell of home made industry and sawdust coming from my father’s workshop in the cellar, the Fels Naptha soap that my mother used to wash the floors, the mix of sea smells only a few blocks away? I remember but can’t quite remember that smell of home. I wonder if my children have the same sort of recollection, a connection to their childhood at an elemental level, something so evocative that it really never leaves us. And then do we seek it out unconsciously?
There are the sounds of leaves underfoot in the Fall that reawaken my college girl self, so confident, so disciplined, on her way. The scent of autumn is the scent of rich promise even now when I am so much more past than future.
And the smell of spring earth, elemental and always forward. Uniquely a prescription, gardens and our hands in the earth bring us not back but to the future. More of a promise than a part from the past.
Cashmere Bouquet is my Aunt Mina’s house. A special, rich remembrance of family that I recreate whenever I find that soap. I am 12 and eating tomato soup from a bowl that has a flower on the bottom. My Aunts are gossiping around the table and all Is right with the world.
And sitting to the right of my computer is my father’s rosary. A man of unshakable faith despite a hard and difficult life, these black beads echo my Dad’s image of a life well lived and his teachings of perseverance and honesty.
Or the music that my mother played on our Zenith radio. Today it is called the American Song Book, and that book can, when opened bring back a richness of memory that is unequalled, except for that which came as I walked in our front door. Music can bring me to places I haven’t been for forty years and more, special walks in dappled sunlight, the sound of my shoes on the terrazzo floors at school, lullabies that I sang to my babies in the quiet of late evening, dancing in high heels to the sound of an earthy saxophone and brilliant trumpet. I hear “Michael Row the Boat Ashore and we are all together again, my sisters, my brother, my Mom and my Dad, singing a round and creating family. Oh, my, what power is music to define all those people that we were and times that we lived.
We are so much more than the sum of our parts.