I was about nineteen when one day over lunch with mother at her favorite cafe I asked her what she believed in. Now my mother is generally a very guarded person around family. When it comes to what she thinks and feels she lets my father decide and announce those for her. But this time she spoke up.

She sat there for a moment looking at her well manicured nails and then she began wringing her hands. I was so afraid she would just start bawling there in public with fifty people staring at her. Then after a moment she stopped. She looked at me with her soft green eyes and gave alittle shrug of the shoulders. And then she told me something that had me, the believer in everything, gaping at her like she was crazy!

She eased her self back in her chair, perparing for this story with a look something akin to relief. A small sigh escaped her rosie lips. When I was a toddler she said looking at me with a glazed look, I used to have fits. Well being as spoiled as I was, there was no doubt in my mind that I had many tantrums. Oh but no, she said these were not temper tantrums, they were trance like she explained. Barely old enough to carry on a conversatin of any great importance or sense, she said I would have emince conversations about my life and past. During these so called fits I was an eight year old girl named Ava.

My father being the logical type that he is, dismissed it as playing. However mother said they got worse, so father decieded that any time I would have an episode to ignore me and I would eventually stop. Of course as always he was correct and after a few weeks it worked.  A year went by before I had another “attack” she said.

According to her I was four years old and we were in the car driving to an estate sale that one of mothers friends was having. As we slowly drove down the road looking for the sale an old wooden house came into view. That is when the fit took place and Ava came back into our lives. Mother was now wringing her hands again and looking anxious as she leaned forward and continued in a whisper. I yelled, cried and screamed she said for her to stop the car, insisting that I,Ava, lived there and we had to stop! Of course how ridiculous is that, of course she wasn’t going to stop she said. As she continued past the house I became uncontrollable. Wanting to just calm me so she could continue to her sale, she put the black Mercedes in reverse and eased back to the house. The closer we came to the house the worse I got, caught between extreme moments of excitement and sadness. Tugging her along as we stepped out of the car into the over grown lawn.

As we approached the house I talked more of my life as Ava, and describe the layout of the house, even pointing out my bedroom window. At this point mother had about all she could take.Yet curiosity got the best of her. She said the house was an old two story farm house. The siding was old weathered wood, which must have been white at one point. By then it was a greying color, like the color of concrete. There were peices of wood and trash scattered around the yard. The windows had been boarded, though most of those had been removed by vandals or time. So being the noisy sort she was ,she wanted to get a peek inside. The door was soundly boarded, so a peek in the windows was the only way. Mother said for some reason I became very distantly melancholy and insisted I could go no father than the bottom step of the large front porch.

She went around to the first window to have a looksie and that is when her faith was rocked to the core! Everything was as I said it would be. She looked in all the ground floor windows. It was all the same! Down to the cornflower blue wallpaper with tiny white daisies which was now yellowing with age, tattered and peeling from the living room walls.

Seeing that wallpaper was all she could take. She was terrified! There was no way I could have know any of those things, but I did. Now not wanting to scare me she walked as quickly as she could, picked me up and took me to the car,by this point I was back to myself. She said she has never been so afraid of anything and for anyone in all her life. After jumping in the car, she said she drove as fast as she could home as if the hounds of hell were following right behind her. She even forgot about her estate sale, and for mother to forget a sale it must have been tramatic!

She sat back after finishing the story and closed her eyes. How frail she looked in that moment. Small and petite like me with her honey blonde hair tied up in a bun. I noticed for the first time the thin lines that time had begun to etch into her heart shaped face. Sighing she continued, insisting I never tell another living person. For she had never even told my father and Ava had never returned after that day. She was so afraid of how people would treat us if they knew, she was afraid for my very soul she had said with a shiver.

As I think about my childhood with this knowledge, I begin to understand my mother better, understand our distant but loving relationship more. Was this conversation a bonding moment for us, absolutely not. It was however an awaking of sort of moment, which gave me a new found respect as well as a bit of sympathy for my mother.

Tags: Cassidy, Farmhouse, mercedes, Wellington