I’ve always been comfortable with the feeling of egg yolks rivering down my arms.
Growing up, I lived one block, (or exactly 9 houses, the shuttered white one on the corner always giving out king-sized Snickers bars on Halloween), from my Nana’s. Nearly every day in summer, I’d leave our late 1800’s buttercup Victorian and make the walk, sometimes attempting to expertly maneuver my Skip-It around and around my 7 year-old ankle while crossing the street.
My aunt and I, five years apart, would huddle together on her bedroom floor, our backs against the purple flowered bedspread, gently piercing eggs with thumbtacks on both ends, and blowing out the yolks into empty sour cream containers with the tiny coffee stirring straws we stealthily fisted every time we went to 7-11 for platters of two-dollar nachos and huge blue Slurpees, (before jumping on the trampoline and seeing who’d barf first).
And setting those hollowed eggs gingerly on her nightstand, we’d write notes to our future selves, to the future people who’d live at my Nana’s, and notes to boys we’d never had the nerve to talk to but sometimes thought about holding hands with at Skate City–rolling them up into tight little bundles and slipping them into their delicate porcelain casings.
Digging through the mountains in her closet, we’d pull out an old jewelry box with Lisa Frank ponies emblazoned across the top, or a teal plastic pencil box, or an old giftbox from her birthday the previous October, dumping out the contents on the carpet and nesting our eggs in thick, wasteful layers of one-ply toilet paper.
Sometimes we’d kiss the eggs with old orange lipstick or sprinkle them gratuitously with huge chunks of multi-colored glitter, but the end result was always the same.
Slipping out the backdoor, walking through the side gate, and hunkering at the base of the lilac bushes in the front yard, the hulking flowers separating my Nana’s yard from Lillian’s. We’d scrape by the roots with our hands, the dirt caking under our fingernails, (all painted a different color), pushing worms out of our way, and jamming the boxes into the ground. Time capsules of our childhood and wishes for future.
Honestly? It was all very cliché , but it made us feel important and romantic. Unique and grown.
And despite our life-or-death levels of secrecy, Lillian would always step out onto her porch seconds after we’d heap dirt over our eggs and pat down the pile, her crooked screen door whining on its hinges and her cane clanking against the worn wood of her porch.
She always called for us, and we always went, sitting in her tiny living room that was cluttered with the rocks she took from Egypt in 1962. The poster of her when she was an original pin up model for Coca-Cola, her 16 year-old pincurls immortalized in the painting that sat on the floor, caddy-corner by the door to the bathroom. Her big church hats, complete with lace veils that hovered over her left eye with a thin layer of gauze that so perfectly complimented the thin, papery folds of her laugh lines.
She smelled like cold Folger’s coffee and dirt roads after it rains, and after laying out a store-bought box of coffee cake and warm black tea, she’d tug the bottom of my curls before settling her 94 year-old ass in a high-backed pink chair and folding her hands into a knot against her soft stomach.
We’d sip our tea, feeling fancy because she always had actual sugar cubes on a tiny plate with silver tongs. She told us about her dead husband, her fingers finding the place on her hand where her ring should be, if it hadn’t been stolen in 1978 when they took a trip to Vietnam, three months before he passed. About her time working as a typist in Chicago, where it was inappropriate to show her ankles between the hours of 9 and 5, Monday through Friday. About how much she loved the circus, landing her a midnight date on a San Francisco boardwalk with a fire-breather named Xavier. (Her mother, for the record, did not approve.)
And she always reminded us of the same two facts.
“You can either get old, or you can die, and one of those choices means people throw dirt on your face.”
And:
“How you spend your days is how you spend your life.”
I don’t remember the date that Lillian died. I didn’t go to her funeral, and I don’t know where she’s buried. I don’t have a locket with her picture, or a photo of her in a polka-dot bikini, selling bottles of soda from her childhood backyard.
But I remember the way she woke with the sun, put out plates of canned tuna on tupperware lids for the neighborhood’s stray cats, and always patiently watched my aunt and I bury our secrets on her property line.
She lived unapologetically, a raucous force of adventure that settled next to my Nana long enough to teach me about priorities. To teach me about famous museum heists. To teach me about living life in a way that leaves you worn out and weathered, travelled and well-treated.
She spent her days exhilarated, gaining momentum as she rocketed around the world, setting up shop wherever struck her fancy, finding love and letting it go. She spent her life completely.
We have that opportunity. We have that obligation. To make our days unique pieces of our bigger puzzles, remembering what it means to dig in the dirt and feel uninhibitedly hopeful.
How you spend your days is how you spend your life.
And it’s time we all find some fire-breathers, letting them light our way through catacombs and sipping Chardonnay from fine china.
What’s your favorite story, (about circuses, or otherwise)? Share ‘em in the comments!