A Yellow Elephant

Thursday, April 15, 2021

I once bought a large, cheap print of a yellow elephant and her baby. This was when I lived in Vancouver, a time and a place that holds a painful, beautiful time in my mind and my heart. It is not anything particularly stunning, but I liked the whimsical simplicity of it. Since then, the picture has taken on new meaning.

It reminds me of the time in my life when I began to wake up and notice the world around me. It reminds me of water and movement and mountains and mist. It reminds me of when I had babies, now that my children are all skinny legs and pre-pubescent body odor. It reminds me of when I learned what the word nuance meant. I am taken back to salty air and rosemary rock salt bagels, to the time when I began to read again and when I had a really, really good haircut. I am reminded of the morning that my children and I happened upon a family of seals playing on the sea wall as we made our way to preschool. It was magic.

I see the faces of the women who took me in, and loved me, and became my sisters. It was when and where I birthed my third child on the winter solstice. I vividly remember trudging up Ash Street, snow quietly falling, as I walked to my last OB appointment the morning before I went into labor, having to stop on the incline to catch my breath and looking up, noticing the black birds against the grey sky, and feeling exhausted and a little sad, too. It’s funny what scenes we remember. Why that particular moment? It lives in my brain viscerally. Sophie’s middle name is Willow, which is a piece of her birthplace in the form of the name of a street that I loved walking down. I remember the cherry blossoms.

Vancouver was also a rebirth of sorts, of my own—a time where I started to learn about empathy and become myself. Where I started to become less afraid to look at and question my past, my childhood, my beliefs and worldview. Since then, there are things I see and believe that seemed impossible at the time. In What Kind of Woman by Kate Baer, in a poem titled “Advice for Former Selves” she writes:

“Revision is necessary. A compulsory bloom.”

Those words in that order also live in my brain on a loop, I can’t not keep coming back to them, like an addiction.

What is memory? And smell? And music! Intangible forces that have the power to bring me to my knees. They make me feel something, anything.