Everything Left to Remember by Steph Jagger

Author:Steph Jagger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

12

The Difference Between Erosion and Erasure

It serves us well to turn our eyes earthward and study the oft-overlooked wisdom beneath our feet.

—ROBERT MOOR

Our start the next morning was slow. I was tired and my mother was cold. I wrapped her in an extra down jacket and pulled our camping chairs over to the edge of Wild Creek, a meandering stretch of water that serves as the drainage for Saint Mary Lake. We lingered there, eating breakfast from that spot, watching the sun slide up the edge of the sky until it started casting light off the surface of the water.

As the sun rose, I noticed my mom starting to squint, so I walked back to the campsite and grabbed her sunglasses out of her purse.

“Put these on, Mom,” I said, as I placed the sunglasses in her hands.

“Oooooh, that feels better.” She sighed. “I forgot I had these. They’re so handy, aren’t they?”

I rested my hand on her shoulder and gestured for her and my aunt to hand me their dishes.

“Here,” I said. “I’ll get us cleaned up.”

My mom handed me her mug and spoon before turning to my aunt.

“She’s so talented,” she said. “I don’t know how she knows how to do all these things.”

My aunt laughed, knowing full well it was my mother who taught me how to do most of the things I was doing.

“I’ll take a bit more coffee,” she added. “Only if there is some.”

“Coming right up, Auntie B,” I said.

As I walked across the small gravel easement, I heard my mom’s voice.

“Look at those—”

She lost the word she was searching for.

“Dandelions,” said Brenda, filling in the gap.

“Dandelions,” repeated my mother. “Yes. They’re all wearing funny yellow hats.”

I looked over my shoulder, spotting the patch of yellow flowers my mother was looking at. They were sitting quite close to a bank of bright green clover. Dandelion is one of the fifty-some odd words removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary in 2007.

Others that went with it include kingfisher, lark, otter, raven, starling, and thrush. Ash, bramble, holly, fern, and mint. Blackberry went too. So did clover. As the story goes, none of these words were used enough to warrant inclusion.

When I read about this, a lump the size of a chestnut formed in my throat. Chestnut is gone too, by the way.

The list of words that replaced the above were mostly technology based. Words like broadband, MP3 player, block graph, and chat room. As well as others like celebrity, debate, citizenship, and conflict. The two additions that stuck out the most, though, were the phrase “cautionary tale” and the word endangered.

This slow peeling away of words was also happening in my mother’s brain. And for us as a collective, we’re letting what seem like little things slip away, losing grasp of the words that quite literally make up the world around us. Forgetting them. What does this say about the world around us, I wonder? How fast will it slip from our fingers?

Later that morning, we threw a few granola bars and hard-boiled eggs into a pack, and we hopped into the car.

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