Hester Hatfield Bowlin
Hester Bowlin was my father's mother, she who gave birth to ten children and tended to a steady litter of grandchildren. I remember Hester would make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with a spoon, and they tasted better made that way. At Christmastime, a Sears and Roebuck catalog was passed around and you could pick a present and they would get it for you. I remember her face lost behind a pair of glasses, and a warmth that extended beyond mere Grandma status, into a sort of matriarchal position.
More memories stick to the environment of their home for me, like the strange stain at the bottom of the stairs down to the basement? Was it really a bloodstain or were they telling me an elaborate sort of inside family joke? My Grandparents had had a new house built, on the same stretch of property that included a grand lake and the remains of their previous home. I was forbidden to go into or explore the old house, so I stuck to the backyard and the small body of water seems to resonate in distant memory retention. How it would freeze over in the winter and the adults would test its firmness before we were allowed on the ice.
There was a hammock, slung between two trees that was hung in the warmer months of the year, and you'd get into it and swing low between the trunks and the net would just swallow you in a cocoon of rough hemp. I would lay in it and stare at the crumbling mystery in the old house. The place seemed to radiate a strange energy for me, like more than one psychotrauma had occurred there. Attempted murder, mad rages, the white hot grief over a drowned son, that's there too, with the tenderness of this woman, torn between being loyal to her husband and son and hating him for making it happen. The whole experience that happened during my parent's divorce, it conquered and divided the family dynamic and left us holding broken pieces with shrapnel shards sticking out everywhere. I'm not at liberty to discuss the circumstances of the final schism, but I will say something in my Grandmother's bloodline boiled in her vessels and set forth a disincarnate energy that exists as a guardian spirit of her nephews, to protect and look after them in a way she had to discontinue dealing with her grandchildren.
But she passed away some years ago, the victim of disease, and yet, where is her spirit? Has it been sent to her own heaven? I would think, if she were to choose, her paradise would be in the presence of her brood, her clan, on the outskirts of their lives, if only to observe and sometimes aid in difficult situations. In death, some part of her still fills that capacity.
But how do we learn to feel her presence? Can she be called upon, for congress or for aid, this matron who changed a million diapers and made ten million pb&j's with a spoon, she is connected to us from our memory reserves, from a twinkling, maybe the presence of something else there with you. Somewhere, she watches over her kin, she of Hatfield blood, from her Mother's side, who adored Robert Mitchum with the devotion of a flagellant but when whoever took the spill down those stairs, from the hallway facing the living room down to the cement floor, she nursed them back to health and she sent him on and she keeps watch now over an infinite number of households, spread out over a giant life size map that her spirit lingers over, in that place with no time, no aging, no more death. She is comfortable there, but who knows when she'll make her next appearance. She's busy with the great-grandchildren, communicating during commercial breaks and afternoon naps, waiting up when one of them goes out late. But she's there.
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