I stay on the cape kicking up the dirt while walking this last promontory of land. I am reviewing my mother’s record of memories. I am remembering what has been written on the flyleaf of the book. I think about what she has told me. I visualize what I have seen for myself with eyes that could never turn away. Something new has occurred to me. What has my mother not told me?

Perhaps my mother has left out something from my record of memories. What my mother has left out is a piece I can only imagine. Perhaps my mother wanted me to imagine this piece. Perhaps my mother guarded secrets she didn’t want me to know. How can I know?  My mother has not told me if there are things that I don’t know. My mother, perhaps, even with me was just …

 … perhaps …perhaps …

I wonder how my mother became so confined in her marriage to my father. Was it the exploration of her life with my father that came first as it was on this small piece of land or was it oppression from the start? Was it out of love? Was it out of need? How did my mother and father both reside with each other in this web of dark habit with their union like a red-eyed spider lurking that would sting and sting at will? Over the years I will wonder why my mother will stay. Why won’t they let each other go? 

My mother will want my father to protect the yearning of the distilled fragrance of the elusive in her. My father will not protect her vulnerable courage that is her delicate treasure. My father will try to break my mother’s yearning. He will try to break her delicate treasure. He will try to break my mother’s yearning over and over. Was my father’s desire to break her yearning for the distilled fragrance of the elusive meanness and cruelty, you ask. Or was it something in my mother he could not understand viewed from the promontory of his own emptiness …his own need that could not be filled? Was it fear? You will ask all of these questions. I have no answer why my father wanted to break my mother’s delicate treasure.

What did my mother face when she walked out on this cape? Was it something? Was it nothing at all?

How can I know?