Digressions: My Life in 500 Words or Less

Often the smaller legacies left by loved ones are the most meaningful. This has proved to be true time and time again when it comes to remembering my parents.

While they left behind home and land, those properties would not mean much to me without the context of the lives connected to them. My parents filled them with everyday activity, interests and their very essences.

Additionally, personal effects or those created by their hands hold more than the sum of the materials from which they are made. These objects hold time and memories.

One case in point is a specific dress my Mom wore in the late ’60s or early ’70s, which I have as a keepsake. It is a sleeveless black and yellow garment that — when I was a kid — I used to refer to as her “bumble bee dress.”

The strongest memory I have of that dress involves one of the many family outings we made to the Fort Knox community fair. It was still daylight, and my little brother and I had decided to ride the Farris wheel.

I was probably between 10 and 13 and my brother was between seven and 10. When the Farris wheel began to climb and everything below us began to look small, my brother started to get scared. To try to calm him, I made a game of trying to find Mom wandering the midway below us because she was wearing the “bumble bee dress” and would be easy to spot, I told my brother. We eventually did find Mom, but more importantly my little brother made it through the ride.

Among the items left behind by my father are various reminders of what he enjoyed, including cigar boxes, pipes, books and magazines. Those things conjure up images of Dad relaxing in a chair on the front porch, smoking a pipe or cigar, or sitting in his recliner in the living room, thumbing through a book or magazine.

But the items left behind which hold the greatest memories of Dad are those related to his artwork. And those are plentiful, from paintbrushes to palettes, from hand-painted crafts to unframed oil paintings.

One of Dad’s craft projects involved painting hollowed out egg shells, often mounted on small pieces of wood as Easter-themed knickknacks. It’s hard to look at them without imagining Dad sitting at his work table under a buzzing fluorescent light holding the fragile egg in one hand and brushing on color with the other.

I kept one of the Easter-themed ones. Then I found an egg he painted with a butterfly on it.

Dad came to associate butterflies with Mom, especially after she passed away. In a way, butterflies became a magical symbol, a mystical presence.

Looking at the hollowed out egg with a butterfly painted on it, a casual onlooker would not see those qualities.

But that’s one of the hidden powers of existence: it allows us to leave behind small invisible legacies.