Chapter 4
Both these boxes, housed but not hidden at the base of their bedroom closet, attested peculiarly to lives previously lived by these people known to Taylor simply as his parents.
The difference between their boxes was that his father’s was stuffed with memories and mementos and rites of passage, whereas his mother’s contained curious and disparate items. I don’t know why I keep this stuff, she’d laugh when coming across Taylor cross-legged on her bedroom carpet, the contents of the box spread around him.
She’d pop her head around the door and she would say oh, not all that old rubbish again!
But year in year out Taylor would take a handful of the small and unremarkable shells to his ear, hoping for the sound of a distant shore though it never came.
He’d scrutinise the old spoon, twizzle it around and around, wondering why one side was shorn off at an angle.
His mother once told him it had belonged to her grandmother.
He’d imagined the woman to be all wizened and witch-like and that spoon wasn’t going anywhere near his mouth, even if it was loaded with ice cream.
Then there were the lumps and chunks of rock which felt cold and dense and inert in the palm of his hand, each a twisting gnarl of light greys and dark.
This is rock is nice – it is three billion years old, it is as old as the moon, his mother had told him.
Taylor wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth, the moon being white and all.
There was also an old book, Gràs am Pailteas, printed in a language he couldn’t read with a name handwritten: Dàibhidh MacLeòid, his great grandfather, apparently.
Then there were just the two photographs: one of the grandparents he’d never met, on their wedding day; one of his mother aged ten in her school uniform.
However, most fascinating to Taylor were the four pieces of cloth woven in different colours and patterns, each little bigger than a carton of breakfast cereal.
When he was young, he’d stroke them over his bare skin, drape them over his arms and legs.
It’s scratchy, he’d say to his mom. That’ll be the tickle, she’d explain, brushing the fabric lightly against his cheek.
And then she’d point at each piece as if it was a map.
I am from here. And here. Here. And here.
I am from a family of weavers, she’d say.
My father was a weaver, my grandparents and their parents too.
But that’s pretty much all he knew about her family. They were dead now. They’d never been close. His mother had left at sixteen to see the world and now she was leaving home once again.
The gusting air coming off the sea, the rush of gasp-cold water, lifted Taylor’s hangover.
Here he was, he was here. All around, speckling the sand, tiny shells whose silent cousins his mother had filled her pockets with when she left over forty years ago.
These hills were strewn with the humping great slabs of grey buckled rock, small samples of which his mother had taken with her.
This rock is nice. This rock is Gneiss. It is three billion years old, it is as old as the moon. Taylor believed her now.
He turned a slow full circle, drinking it all in, understanding how he knew where he was, how this place could be familiar.
The colours of water, land, sky. The textures of sand, grass, rock.
The light and the shade and always the wind, changing the character of everything at any given moment.
Of course he’d seen it before. Everything around him was told in the tweed, in the patterns and colour and texture.
The tweed mapped and catalogued this place.
Taylor had not checked with his mother if he could take the four pieces from the box.
He hadn’t asked her if it was okay to bring them to Europe and back to the island where they had been woven by his grandfather, a man he’d never met.
Taylor had found his mom’s box in the pile at the back of the garage destined for the dump.
The wind was taking a break. Sun and cloud had reached a truce.
A nascent warmth was released. He let the surf bibble over his feet for a few minutes more before he turned for the long trudge back through the dunes to the cottage.
Tucking his rolled-up socks into the back pocket of his jeans and with his slides in his hand, barefoot he clambered up and away from the beach.
As a little kid, Taylor worried that he would not know what to keep of his life for posterity, for his own future box.
He would obsessively squirrel away all manner of stuff and hide it under his bed.
As Flora’s House came into view, Taylor thought about where he was now and who he’d been then and he laughed at himself. What a weird little guy he’d been.