Sadly, I am out of personal Evelyn stories now. But I had a note from Jack and Julia’s first grand daughter who remembered Evelyn visiting her grand parents in Cambridge when she was a little girl. Look at how many silken fragments of Evelyn’s essence she caught in this short paragraph:
“And I loved Evelyn Coffey too! I looked so forward to her visits, I can even remember her smell! And her voice and face was so angelic!! So beautiful! My Brother Paul and I would save any found coins for her as she would have them blessed and donate to the poor! And she was a wonderful cook! I’ll never forget a salad she made (I didn’t eat salads then) where she had sliced apples in it! I started eating salads from that point on!”
Henceforth, I shall add a poem each day and hope that as time passes, ones who knew Evelyn will stumble into this blog and send their memories.
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Our baby lost Spence.
Have you seen a white kitten?
Youthful grief is intense:
Our baby lost Spence.
Little cats have no sense.
Its address is unwritten.
Our baby lost Spence.
Have you seen a white kitten?
Evelyn Coffey
Remembering Evelyn's smell - how wonderful that the woman wrote of this memory, because as soon as I read it, I remembered her smell too! By the time Evelyn finally trusted me to come into her apartment, we had been neighbors for several years. It was her befriending our "sweet little doggie" that led he to befriend us, to come beyond the little circle of her shyness. Some leaking faucet, perhaps, or some imagined gremlin who would not leave come morning, I don't recall the reason that she asked me to come up. Her place was like a curio shop, or perhaps a flea market. She could walk only along a narrow path through her collection of things, from the entrance past one accessable reading chair in the living room past the bathrooom, to a little corner of her kitchen, to one space on her bed where there was just enough room among the little stuffed things for her to lie in the impression left by her tiny frame. She wore the same few changes of clothes all the time, always black. "When you wear bright clothes, people look at them; when you wear black, they look at your FACE." As a result of her tight surroundings and self-limited wordrobe, Evelyn had a scent of powder and humanity that was consistent, somehow musky but sweet.
ReplyDeleteFunny how our sense of smell is a string that retrieves memory.