By Wendy Hudson
Photos from her childhood. I don’t recall ever seeing photos of her as a baby, or as a girl growing up in North Toronto with her mom and two brothers. Did I look like her? Her family had no pictures of her Chinese immigrant father who died when she was a toddler. No one ever spoke of him. There was no trace of him at all, so he wasn’t even a ghost.
Family home movies. I saw a movie once of my parents when they were dating. Grainy black-and-white scenes at her family’s Thanksgiving dinner. She wore a button-front shirt and dungarees. He had a crew cut. She gave him a shy smile and he beamed back at her as the film click-click-clicked through the projector, the only soundtrack accompanying this moment. Through my child’s eyes, I couldn’t imagine they had a life before they were my mom and dad.
The framed graduation photo of her nursing school class. Rows of little oval portraits of smiling young women wearing white uniforms and caps, looking forward to bright futures.
Her engagement ring and wedding band. When they announced their plans to marry, my father’s Danish parents disapproved of their interracial marriage. We won’t come to the wedding, they said. Fine, my father said. But everyone was there and wished them a happily ever after.
Her metal recipe box filled with handwritten index cards. Beef Stroganoff was my favorite.
The mother-daughter dresses she made for us in sky blue polyester crepe. I loved holding her hand when we wore our matching dresses, and I smiled at the ladies at the market when they told us how cute we were.
The Gumby and Pokey toys she bought for me that I kept under my pillow each night and played with until the wires poked through their rubbery bodies. I would never have thrown them out but somehow they went missing.
Photos of our family of four. My dad, my mom, my little brother, and me. Sometimes I wish I had proof that this little family unit existed. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if the baby, so close to full term, had survived. But instead of a family of five, we became a family of three.
The sound of my mother’s voice. Although I can no longer hear her, I can picture her sitting on the edge of my bed singing “Que Sera, Sera” to me before she turned out the light.
Her fine china, white with an off-center trio of starbursts the size of a quarter. She brought out these dishes for special occasions and trusted me to set the table. I placed them just so with the stars at the top, like a tiny constellation shining down on earth.
The gray and white sweater she knit for me with shiny silver buttons. I wore it until it was too short, and I could no longer fit my arms through the sleeves.
My parents’ album of Desafinado by Stan Getz. It was the soundtrack of my early childhood, the record constantly spinning on our hi-fi. I can picture my parents swaying together to its bossa nova rhythms.
The painted deer pin that reminded me of Bambi. She always fastened it to my dress before the two of us went to church.
Her unfinished embroidery with pink pigs and many loose threads.
The pale green maternity dress with white rickrack down the front that she wore in her third trimester during those hot summer months.
The memory of her last hug and kiss. Those final embraces are lost to me, but I do remember us waving to each other as I stood on the neighbor’s front lawn just days before my seventh birthday as she and my dad drove off to the hospital. The baby was coming soon but my mom wasn’t feeling well. We couldn’t know she would never come home.