Memories Of Good By Linda Stowe
The lady across the street started flying an American flag several months ago. I don’t know what brought it about, and perhaps it doesn’t matter. I only know that it appeared one day and has been there ever since, rising and falling in the breeze. Like me, she lives alone, though her daughter comes by now and then to help. I watch the flag sometimes and think about how little we really know about one another’s lives, how much goes unspoken.
The other day, when I caught sight of it moving in the wind, it carried me back to my childhood and to the clothesline strung across our yard on laundry day. Sheets and shirts billowed and snapped, and everything smelled clean and sun-warmed as we folded it. It would be a Monday, and supper would most likely be beef and noodles or chicken and noodles, depending on what my mother had made for Sunday dinner the day before. The noodles would be broad and homemade, and my sister, always the picky eater, would brood about having them again.
The memory came and went quickly, as such things do. Soon I was sitting at the window again, looking out at the flag across the street. It moved steadily in the breeze, carrying whatever meaning it held for her. And it seemed to me that it held something else as well—a reminder that each of us is full of these small, private stories, hanging out in the open, like laundry on a line, visible and hidden at the same time. Maybe that’s reason enough to put a flag out, or to make noodles for supper, or simply to pause and remember.
Wordle guess words: about, broad, brood
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Polly here.
This is some of Linda’s most beautiful writing ever.
I am reminded that each of us is full of these small, private moments, these stories in our lives. Those things that we show to others and those that we keep hidden. I love when these memories arrive. They come about without warning and take us to a place where we haven’t been for a long time.
Right now, I am thinking about my mom’s potato soup on the first chilly day in Autumn. I miss those times. But it is such a sweet thing to be able to remember.
