December 25, 2010: I’m in the Azore Islands for Christmas this year. It’s a place I’ve never visited before, where I have no associations, no friends, no family, no past. The Azore Islands are Portuguese so I do not share a common language or the insular island culture with those living here—(although of course many people speak English and this is a European community even though it is in the middle of the Atlantic ocean). The architecture is uniquely Portuguese—gothic and baroque churches with exteriors painted in bright colors, often blue or yellow and white; red-roofed houses also trimmed in the same bright colors of red, green, yellow, blue, often with blue and white tiled scenes embedded on the walls. The sea is omnipresent, on all sides at all times.
All of this to say that I am living a completely different experience, and encountering sights and people heretofore unknown to me.
And yet, daily I am assailed by memories of my own here.
The first day, in Ponta Delgada, capital of the biggest island, San Miguel, we were wandering through the charming city center—16th and 17th century buildings, beautiful plazas decorated with white geometric markings. It was a Sunday morning and the bells of Sao Sebastiao cathedral began to peal and so we, along with the local people, entered the church. I stood at the back, admiring the wood carvings, the massive walls, the paintings, as people filed past me to find places to sit. I vaguely noticed a small older woman in a dark coat passing by, and finding a pew. And suddenly, in the wake of her passage, I smelled something, something other than the candle wax and gentle mustiness of the church. I smelled the woman’s perfume, a scent that had remained in the air where she had passed, and out of that scent of perfume arose my own grandmother, it was redolent of the perfume she too would put on before going to church, and for a few seconds I was no longer in the cathedral of Ponta Delgada but back in my grandmother’s bedroom in Rushville, Illinois, standing behind her as she sat at her grey dressing table putting on her earrings and dabbing perfume on either side of her dear old face. Yet I was not in my grandmother’s house, but on foreign soil in a foreign church and the perfume was not my grandmother’s but that of an unknown woman who wore something similar which had evoked the presence of my grandmother and given me an unexpected pang of longing and nostalgia.
Another day here, I glanced into a shop window to admire some of the local embroidery, grey stitchings of foliage and flowers on white or beige cloth—and another memory arose—I recognized those embroideries, I have a piece just like them, given to me by my mother one summer day in our beach cottage. We were down in the little Yachats laundry room and she was pulling out pieces of material from a cupboard there, and she held out a very pretty embroidered piece and said, “Here, why don’t you take this?” “Oh Mom, it’s pretty, don’t you want it?” “No, you take it honey.”
And I did, and I cannot see it without remembering my mother. But I did not expect to remember the Yachats laundry room and my mother’s gift of embroidery here on this trip to the Azores.
Our second day on Terceira island, we were walking along a path up above the sea on Mount Brazil, a small mountain that juts out into the ocean along one side of Angro Do Heroismo, the capital of the island. It was a sunny morning, light glinted off the sea, and the earth smelled of damp earth (it had rained the night before) and ferns and cedar. It is not really the season of flowers here, it is considered winter (this despite temperatures that can reach 70 degrees F) and so not the season for lilies. Yet one lily had gone ahead and bloomed anyway, a huge one just off to the ocean side of the path. I reached over and pulled the big white flower toward me, very carefully so as not to break it, and dipped my face to it, deeply breathing in its fragrance. I had been feeling content and serene—delighted with the sunny morning, the walk up above the sea, my happy husband next to me—so why in breathing in the lily did I feel a sudden stab of sorrow? I didn’t have to search for the memory—it came of its own. The scent of lilies is also one associated with my grandmother—not only because of the surprise lilies that grew right at the summer kitchen backdoor—white like this one—but also because of going to church with Grandma. The Rushville church was often decorated with lilies and so they are forever associated with my going to church with Grandmother.
This afternoon, during another sea walk, this time along the southern side of the island, with fog rolling in from the sea, visiting what they call here natural swimming pools (pools along the coast created by the huge lava deposits), I came up to a very ordinary sort of look-out promontory along the sea with some houses to one side, and beyond, a rising hill, and to my dismay—yes, dismay for I am trying to immerse myself in the Azores and live in the present moment—I was instantly transported to a familiar place from my adored little seaside town in Oregon, I seemed to be standing on the beach road that circles around Yachats, seeing the lava rocks of that coast and for a few seconds I was gazing out not at the Atlantic but at the Pacific: briefly, oh too briefly, I was not in a country not my own, but home, home!
But the sharpest memory of all so far—the one that drew blood—was just this morning—Christmas day. This Christmas day is entirely different from any I’ve spent. I have no family around me but Francois, no tree, no decorations (only a branch of a cedar tree, a bouquet of hydrangea picked alongside a road, and a tall arum stuck into a Portuguese wine bottle on a dresser in my hotel room). Nor is there any Christmas turkey or cranberry sauce—we’re eating Christmas dinner out of tin cans, with some fruit, some chocolate and of course some wine. In other words, nothing to evoke Christmases past—which is exactly what I wanted and why I came here.
And indeed, I have not thought of Christmases past. What surged up this morning was something entirely different. After our hotel breakfast, we decided to take a morning walk through the city to one of the two forts that once guarded it against pirate attacks. Our walk led us down a little street alongside the brightly colored houses up above the sea. Just below the street we followed is a tiny and not very pretty beach—of a dull brown colored sand, hemmed in by cement walls and very very small. It in no way resembles the magnificent Oregon beaches that have so marked my life. But a beach is a beach and I decided to scuff my way across it. I descended the stairs leading down to it and walked across the damp mushy sand to the water’s edge.
That is the moment when again completely unexpectedly a vision came to me, of my young father, blond hair blowing in the sea breeze, slim and muscular in his bathing-suit, dashing along the waves followed by two little kids, Nancy and Angus, the three of them zigzagging in and out along the edge of the water, trying not to get caught by it. And as I watched them, I heard the sing-songy words ringing out through the clear air, “Don’t get in the water, don’t get in the water!” The words were chanted by my father and echoed by us, and we were all laughing and around us was a glittering world of white sand and blue sky and blue sea flecked by white foam. Up and down the brilliant beach we ran, chasing and being chased by the waves, led by my handsome boyish father.
And after that bright vision that came to me on a dull and ordinary beach in Terceira followed a dark one, memory not really mine at all in fact. It was of a photograph sent to me a couple weeks ago by that same “little” brother Angus, of our father on his 90th birthday. Thin and absent, face twisted by the last of several strokes this year, struck dumb by them, struck immobile too, now nailed to a wheelchair. I have not actually seen my father like this. A year ago despite the ailments and forgetfulness of an 89 year old, he was walking, talking, and far from being wasted away, still had his generous belly from his delight in champagne and Kathy’s good food. I have not seen my father so utterly diminished as he is now, yet that is the image that haunts me and the one that turned my Christmas day promenade on a tiny Azorian beach into a melancholy remembrance of what has happened to my young father—once dashing across a beach with his first two little kids—and made me glad to climb the stairs and get away from the beach and the memory.
Is it something to do with age, that the older a person gets, the more he or she bumps into memories bruising one’s vulnerable body and heart? So that wherever one goes, to whatever far corner of the world, one keeps meeting one’s own shadows—all those who once peopled one’s world and now have vanished into the shades.
I know this is simply “life”—that every human being who lives long enough will have his or her nostalgic load of memories, of people and places loved, and lost. I know that we all follow the same road and all endure the same losses. I know that my fate awaits me too, not too far up that road, and that it is the same one as my grandmother’s, my mother’s, my father’s. And I know that behind me a nephew or a niece or a younger sister will one day bump up against a memory of me and will mourn the moments shared together, never to come again.
Though I cherish my past and those who were a part of it and are no more, it is painful to have such memories intrude into my present, something they have been doing more and more frequently. It was in fact to get away from sad and morbid thoughts and memories that I came to the Azores this Christmas. I wanted sea winds to blow me clean, to blow through my mind and empty it. I wanted to feel but not to think or perhaps it is that I wanted to think but not to feel. In general, I am better here—we are active, we are on the move, we are absorbed by new sights, and by the daily travel ritual, and in the week since I’ve been here, I have awakened as my old self, anxious to greet the day, rather than as a fearful ghost of myself, anxiety-ridden, sad, apprehensive of the future, melancholy over the past.
But those Proustian moments will not be banished. They will come whether I wish it or not, tugging at my heart, sending me time-traveling into another existence, when I and all I loved were young.
