footprints.

Auntie and me at my wedding in 2010

My Other Footprint

  
I don’t know whether the lawn was wet from dew or if it had been freshly watered. But somehow, our feet were wet when we stepped up the 3 cement stairs to my grandmother’s front door, and my aunt clutched my arm and said, “Look!” Our footprints were exactly the same.

Six years earlier, while I was spending a semester in Italy, she sent me a cookie cake for Valentine’s Day, homemade and shipped in a pizza box. I was used to receiving packages in the mail from her - she sent all her nieces and nephews a care package at college for every holiday, filled with goofy toys and candy. But nobody else got a cookie cake in a pizza box in Florence.

Five years earlier, she flew to North Carolina from Boston to attend my college graduation. After my parents, sisters, and grandparents had gone home, she stayed an extra night, helping me cram my ’96 Mazda Protégé with everything I owned. She waited in the car while I said goodbye to my friends, and then she drove with me to Florida so I could unpack my life, make my plans, and pack it up again. I drove the 13 hours while we sang along to music, talked about writing, and lost ourselves in the freedom of the open road.

Four years earlier, I called her. “I need help.” She already knew about my eating disorder - she was the first and only person in my family I’d told, sitting alone on a stone wall on my college campus and dialing her number in tears because I was terrified. But since she was a psychologist, I trusted the way she’d react. After sending me a referral, she sent me checks. I don’t remember if I went to therapy every week or every other week, but even with my student discount it was too costly on my $12/hour paycheck.  She continued sending checks until I felt I was strong enough to move on.

Three months earlier, I was in her closet, my sister and I packing up boxes of clothes and shoes. We’d arrived at her big familiar house in the morning to help her move out, alone, after her painful and brave decision to leave her marriage. My sister’s husband and my fiancé helped lift heavy furniture into the small U-Haul. It was quiet, solemn work, and when we got to her new apartment, my sister and I set to work putting plates in cabinets, hanging a bright new shower curtain, arranging magnets on the clean white fridge.

One month earlier, we were on the road again. She helped me cram all my bridal shower gifts into my 2005 Honda Civic, and we drove for two days to Nashville, TN, where my fiancé and I would live after our wedding that summer. While I drove, she read to me from her essays and her fiction, dreaming about the book we both knew she’d write someday, talking about how our lives had changed so much in a single year. Somewhere in Virginia we stopped and had blueberry pancakes for dinner at the Cracker Barrel next to our hotel.

Twenty-four years earlier, I was a 3-year old flower girl at her wedding in downtown Boston. I took a few steps in my patent leather shoes, tripped, fell, and burst into tears, as I was prone to do in those days. While my frequent childhood tears became a constant joke in our family (“You were always crying!” “Everything bothered you!”), Auntie never joined in.  “Everyone said you were too sensitive,” she said, “but I always knew you were going to be an artist.”

It seemed impossible that our footprints could look so similar. Just to be sure, she stepped again with her left and I with my right. It was indeed a complete pair, as if they’d always belonged together.