FLOODED WITH MEMORIES
A Widow Bit – May 29, 2011
By Mary Koch

            Memorial Day Weekend is to nostalgia what Thanksgiving Day is to food: A golden opportunity for overindulgence. It seems as if every event this weekend has taken me backwards in time. It is, after all, a weekend devoted not only to beer and barbecues, camping and car races. It’s a weekend for remembering.

            My backwards reveries began – where else but – at the cemetery Saturday morning. I laid a bouquet of brilliantly colored iris on the grave stone, and then sat back to survey the valley that my husband so dearly loved. The usually brown hills are green and lush at this time of year, colored by spring’s frequent rainfalls. At that moment, though, the sky was blue. Amidst the beauty was the bittersweet remembrance of all that was and is no more.

            Any little thing will spark a memory. A newspaper story about campers who were stranded by a mudslide at Salmon Meadows, not far up in the mountains from here, reminded me of our first camping trip after we were married. It, too, was Memorial Day weekend. We, too, were at Salmon Meadows, hunkered around the campfire while falling snow melted in our steaming cups of coffee.

            This weekend’s weather is dismal, so I’ve settled in with a novel, “Nikolai’s Fortune” by Solveig Torvik, and I remember my dad. The novel begins in Scandinavia in the late 1800s, near the time my Swedish grandparents emigrated. While Dad was raised speaking Swedish and eating lefse and lutefisk, links were severed with family in Sweden. I wonder why. The novel gives a glimmer of insight into what any family’s past could include, and I’m saddened there are no memories alive in my family. Those memories died years ago with my grandparents, who did not pass on their stories.

            No matter what I’m doing this weekend, the river is a constant presence. Muddy brown and swollen with silty glacial melt, it is pushing forward with a powerful volume – yet it, too, causes my thoughts to turn backward. I remember seeing the river higher than it is right now, but we who live on its banks are fully aware of the unusually heavy snowpack in the mountains. Will it melt slowly, mannerly, or will it gush in a sudden frenzy down this narrow channel?

            I could take comfort in the two horizontal lines that are painted onto the retaining wall below my house. They mark the water’s maximum height when the valley experienced two “hundred year” floods within two years of each other in the 1970s. This house was unscathed. After those floods, the Army Corps of Engineers, in its questionable wisdom, built a dike on the opposite bank – protecting a large expanse of open park at who-knows-what risk to the residential area on this side of the river.

            I did not live here during those floods, but I remember well my husband’s stories and have examined his photographs. That was then; this is now. I return to the present and allow time to flow, just like a river.