Victoria Lewis

The Red Notebook

Most Sundays I do a long run in the morning. A distant train sounds its regular lament. Oncoming cars swing their headlights wide to give me a lane of my own. Light seeps under the gray clouds, not enough to make out anything in the yards or gardens I pass, just enough to see into the ditch, rife with white weeds and half rotten apples.

I make up a chant and run to the rhythm. Trains, weeds, apples and rot. Trains, weeds, apples and rot. I’ll put it all in my weekly letter to my aunt. Then I remember, she died two years ago and it hurts all over again.

In the spring I’d tell her I stepped over earthworms, each a living brown shoelace sprawled on the wet pavement. In the summer, constellations of blackberries filled the warm breeze with the smell of jam. When I passed a heap of egg-smooth rocks I knew she’d understand how badly I wanted to pick one up and throw it as hard and far as I could down the road.

I didn’t always write, I used to call. The sound of her voice pulled a thread in me that ran the length of my whole life. Then her hearing faded and I was cut off. She wanted no part of hearing aids, let alone email or text messages. At first, I was angry. Then, ashamed of my anger, I took to sending my love long-hand.

I wrote what I’d never say on the phone. The sudden, detergent rush of someone’s laundry. Rabbits, poised like plush toys, at the edge of the pavement. Cherry blossoms, drifted like parade confetti in the gutters. How sometimes I still miss my mother, her sister, gone these forty years.

Recently I realized that when I stopped watching out for things to tell her, I missed both of them even more. So, I got a red notebook to keep track of, as best I can, the things she needs to know.

This morning I slowed to a walk as I turned into the driveway and passed the black mailbox. Like a bird with a single red wing tucked tight to its side, the flag was down. No envelope, with its clean stamp square to the corner, ready to fly away. Some days it hurts to open the red notebook, knowing she won’t fold up my words and slip them between the corduroy armrest and cushion of her chair to re-read later, but what else can I do.

Victoria Lewis grew up on the Oregon coast. She taught school and worked as a computer programmer in Portland. Her work has appeared in The Oregonian, Persimmon Tree, Sweatpants and Coffee, Entropy and Madcap as well as others.
She likes maple bars.