Expressing The Family Genes

My earliest memory is now a recurrent dream of was when I was about three years old, living in Butte, Montana. The dream is in the form of a sketchy movie--like a colorized version of the old reel-to-reel movies we saw in grade school. I’m standing, wearing a pink, oversized, dirty floral dress. I have no socks; only dirty-white tennis shoes house my feet. There is a Band-Aid hanging like a loose shutter, exposing a dirty, red-skinned knee. The other knee is also skinned, but no Band-Aid attempts to hide it. My hair is white-blonde with children’s curls; unattended by a brush or comb. I stoop and with my dirty little hands, reach to pick up—What is it?—it’s a seashell! It is there like the clothes on the floor discarded and don’t belong. It is because it doesn’t belong that I see it.

My sisters, Kathy and Margo, stand near me, watching, as five- and six-year-olds, respectively. They, like me, wear dirty, poorly-sized dresses that seem to belong to someone else. They are also wear sockless dirty shoes. Kathy is looking is looking up at me with dark eyes, large as saucers, holding an adult-sized cup of knowledge and wisdom. Her hair is long and straight brown, with bangs that are cut abruptly and diagonally, as if the stylist slipped. She tells me in her child voice to listen to the ocean in the shell. Margo nods in agreement. Margo has the same enormous dark eyes, as she moves them from the ground upward to watch me; my watchful eyes are like theirs, but blue. Her face is round, and produces a gappy-toothed grin with a Kool-Aid mustache. I notice their knees have no Band-Aids necessary, for I seem to be the only clumsy one.

The shell is cold and hard in my hand, and is roughly ruffled on the edge; yet, smooth where its body meets my little hand. There is a white and brown pattern swirling, but is suddenly camouflaged as the shell falls beneath the strands of my hair. The sound I hear is nothing like I’ve heard before, and is both frightening and soothing. Margo tells me in her child’s voice that the ocean also comes through this drainpipe in which we stand, and she moves her hand to point to the ground. I look up and around with fearful, widened eyes, as if I expect the water could come raging through at any minute. The drainpipe is round and endlessly long, and I look for the ending I will never find as we stand in its beginning. The roof and walls have spots of rusty orange and the floor is intermittently muddy and pooled. The movie flickers and my dream is gone.

My young sisters would be the main family members from which I would learn my family’s history, a history that began in Butte, yet would transform my world forever after we moved to Great Falls, Montana in August of 1964.

My first memory of my mother is as I watch her smooth out the blankets in the back of the station wagon. I quickly climb up to crawl into the back of the car, disrupting her work, too excited by what is new to notice her exasperated look. The car is old and my legs already dusty from the entry, but I don’t appear bothered, as though dirt is common to me. “Where were we going?” I wonder. This must be important because we had never laid blankets back here before.