Phoenix
by Dale J. Sprague
Reveries
12.1997 When I was about four years old, I was with my mother visiting my grandmother. She lived on top of Bebee Hill. Nothing but country all around. The deep woods. The road up to grandparents house was dirt and gravel. Their house was situated just where Bebee Hill started to level off. The road beyond their house snaked over Bebee Hill, but I never ventured much further up that road. Bebee Hill was high up. You could see the other wooded hills all around, which surrounded the small town of Castle Rock, Washington.
I got up one bright and sunny morning there, and my mother was not in the house. I looked in the kitchen and the living room and she wasn't there. I asked my grandmother where my mother was, and she was telling me..but I panicked when I heard the word 'town' and bolted through the front door and ran off the porch at a dead run and down the gravel road. I saw my mother walking down the road ahead of me, and I was screaming, "Don't leave!" I was afraid that she was going to leave me. I radically ran until I nearly reached her. She turned around and told me to stop and go back to the house. She said it will be all right, and that I can stay with grandma. I asked her when she will be back, and she said "Later." She urged me to return to grandma's house. I felt sad, and turned around and started back to the house. I walked for awhile and turned around and watched my mother disappear around the first bend in the road with her box of paints. I went back and asked grandma where she was going. Grandma said, "Walking to town. She'll be back later."
That incident in my life is a strong memory, and the first I recall of my life. It wasn't a pleasant one, a feeling of being abandoned. Later, 47 years later, I was visiting my mother who is still a painter. We were in her studio. She asked me what paintings I wanted because she was cleaning out her studio, making room for new work. One of the pictures was an oil painting of an old church that we've always had hanging on our living room wall from the time I could remember while growing up. I asked if I could keep that picture. I asked her about it, about the church, where it was. She related that the painting is of a small old church in Castle Rock. She said that she once took a long walk from grandmother's house down Bebee Hill into town where the church was because grandmother wanted her to paint the old church before before it was demolished. And then I remembered, and learned why she walked down the hill that morning to Castle Rock. That little feeling of abandonment came back to me, but somehow, I felt compensated with the picture. It rests on the wall of my study. I felt closure.