In the spring after I turned ten, Bev and Gus sold the duplex on Raymond to Davona and Lou, a young couple with a baby named Thayer. I wanted to post a sketch I did of Thayer above—the last portrait I would draw for a number of years—but haven’t been able to find it yet. In any case, Davona and Lou evicted us in short order, and we had to move across the Park. They claimed they were planning to renovate, but I seem to remember some altercation that my dad had with Lou.

In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:

 My mom hated the rambling Doswell house, with its big, drafty rooms and old-fashioned kitchen and bathrooms. She’d wanted something cozy and modern. The previous tenant, a batty old lady named Mrs. Zon, had upped and disappeared several years before, leaving all her worldly possessions behind.   She hadn’t met with foul play, our new neighbors, the Balcomes, reassured us; she’d called them more than once to ask after her adult daughter, but she wouldn’t tell them where she was.

When we went to look at the house, it was crammed with dark, stodgy furniture and dusty draperies. My dad promised my mom to have the house painted, and Mrs. Zon’s belongings were carted up to the attic (where I went poking around, my imagination getting the better of me when I discovered knives among the linens). In the small room at the front of the attic, I also found a huge pile of books that had been dumped there. Sifting through them, I came across one on animal intelligence, a subject that still fascinates me, as well as a book with illustrations called Jungle Babies. I was thrilled to read the chapter on okapis, because they’d only been recently “discovered” in the African rain forest, though, of course, the native people had always known of their existence.

Besides the attic and basement, the house had five bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a separate breakfast nook in the kitchen, which my father didn’t let Doug and me leave each night until we’d eaten our vegetables. I’d distract my brother, then dump my peas on his plate and excuse myself. One night my father came home and roared, “What stinks in here?” He followed his nose to the stove, behind which he found a mess of rotten vegetables. What a dope! I thought uncharitably about my brother. He could have flushed them down the toilet (a bathroom was just off the breakfast nook), and no one would have ever known.

The dirty, cobwebby basement had two large rooms and three small ones, so I was nonplussed when one day my dad ordered Doug and me to go down and clean it all up. As I went down the stairs I thought to myself, “Grownups are always telling you how great you have it as a kid, but the truth is it isn’t easy at all.” And I charged myself to remember that moment when I was an adult so I would never say the same thing to my own children.

To me the old house had a spooky kind of romance. That summer before sixth grade, I started a club with my girlfriends, meeting in the dark little room under the staircase. We hauled a tiny table down from the attic and lighted the place with a small lamp and an extension cord. I think we had, at most, three meetings.

Then late one afternoon I came home and heard my mother in the kitchen telling my father she wanted a divorce—this at a time and place that divorce was almost unheard of. My parents had never fought in front of Doug and me, so her announcement came as a complete shock. She followed me upstairs to my bedroom, where I lay on my bed, sobbing—and promised me that despite the divorce “nothing would change.”

Today, New Year’s Eve day, is the second anniversary of my mother’s death. Last spring I drove again to the distant cemetery that she’d chosen as her final resting place.

In my journal I wrote:

Today I went to visit my mom’s grave at the Sacramento Valley Veterans’ Cemetery near Dixon. At her burial, I could only stand and watch from the road as a machine lowered her coffin into the ground on a dirt slope that hadn’t yet been covered with sod. It was a dismal, darkly overcast day with rain predicted, and the terrain seemed utterly flat and monotonous, with its uniform ranks of identical white headstones stretching in every direction. It struck me at the time as a desolate place, and I wished that my mom hadn’t been so pragmatic and had chosen, instead, to be buried with her family at the cemetery in Concord.

Then yesterday I got word that her marble headstone was finally in place. And this time the weatherman on the news had forecast sunshine.

Though it’s the middle of May, the hills were still partially green—lovely! I thought—in the miles before I reached my destination. When I got out of the car and walked away from the parking lot, I noticed a gully not far off, where I heard red-winged blackbirds calling and I smelled a flowery fragrance—jasmine?—in the air. From the other side of the administration building, I could hear the splash of a fountain and see a row of hills—or mountains—along the valley perimeter. And my impression of the place was completely different than the first time.

For her funeral I’d ordered a “deluxe” bouquet from the local florist in the colors my mom loved—dark and light amethyst roses, chrysanthemums, and daisies, among other blooms. So I’d been dismayed by what I saw in the staging area behind her coffin—a scraggly bunch of flora with white lilies. I’d deliberately avoided lilies because of their overpowering scent. Today I found hedge clippers attached to a trash receptacle and trimmed the ends of my two lush amethyst bouquets, fitting them into a green plastic cone with a prong at the bottom to secure it in the ground.

And what I experienced as I stood contemplating my mom’s headstone, among a welling of complex feelings, was a sense of release—because, I realized, I was finally free to speak my whole truth.