Soapbox: The Way I see Things

…upon

an old
brass bell

gathering
dust

in my mother’s
front hallway*

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I’m five years old, living in the house on Stoneyside Lane. Like my siblings, I’m out playing around the neighborhood: collecting berries from bushes, riding my bike, sweet-talking neighbors into giving me Lorna Doone Cookies.

Then I hear the bell cutting through the late afternoon air. I know what it means, and so do my brother and sisters: we’d better be home for dinner before that sound stops. In fact, every kid in the neighborhood knows to go home when that bell sounds.

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It’s 1979. Late October, 3:30 a.m. I’m home asleep when a sound rouses me from my slumber. It’s…no. It’s not…it is. The brass bell. My mom’s ringing it – am I dreaming? From a Pavlovian place in my brain, I emerge from my room, wandering with my brother and sister down a hallway and through hazy rooms toward that bell. We congregate at a front hallway that’s engulfed in flames before escaping together.

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I’m 35, a full-on adult now and mother to my own kids, and the honorary I’ll-be-the-one-to-drive-in-to-help-with-stuff gal. My parents are moving, downsizing, casting off. There aren’t a lot of possessions I covet, but when I see the bell, I know exactly what I’m taking back to Chicago with me. It doesn’t work at calling my own kids back home (believe me, I tried), but I keep it in my front hallway nonetheless.

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That bell still occupies a place of honor right by my front door. My mom is gone, and even though I’m 53 I could still use some mothering now and again. And when I do, I walk to the front hallway and look at that bell, remembering it’s there to call me home.

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*after William Carlos Williams