Hashtag throwback Thursday to the backyard of my youth on the east side of Buffalo, New York. This was in the time of tube socks, Bactine, and bubble gum. This was before the words ovarian cancer, metastasize, and life expectancy came to be known. We were golden in our green. Our lips the color of popsicles. The sky a Crayola crayon blue. There was no such thing as money or debt or loss or leaving. We were enveloped in the embrace of the neighborhood that extended several blocks. The struggles were unknown, they were the things of adults, and the things of adults were another country to us.  The photographs of my youth are tricks of memory. I look outside of the frame, search inside the house for my mother. My father. But somehow the photograph pulls me outside again. I am on a bicycle again.  I am running through mosquitoes at dusk again. I am a bloody knee. I am a scab. I am the band-aid placed there by my mother. I am peeling the wrapper off of a popsicle again. I am in the backyard again. I am peering through the fence again. I am looking out across the expanse of the neighborhood. The lights are coming on one by one against the darkness. There is the shadow of Mrs. Schlauger again, she is a ghost now. She was a sweetness of wet eyes who we got to know. How was it we got to know her exactly. My brother mowed her lawn when her husband couldn’t anymore. He was an oxygen tube in the front window. She was a candy. I am nine again looking out through the bent chain link fence to the future before the future took hold. Long before the words malignant and stage IV. Before metastasize and glioblastoma.  Before the scratching of numbers on a notepad. The adding and subtracting of a mind at the end. Plus signs and minus signs. The figuring and dividing.  I want to go back again to that fence and come back to it when I am out of college, when I have children of my own. When everything is falling apart. I want to stand at that fence and call out plus sunlight. Plus fireflies. Plus pancakes. Plus you. Plus you. Plus you.

Hashtag throwback Thursday. When I last visited Buffalo I came across some old notes in a box in my father’s basement. Old handwritten grade school notes that were surely passed to me through intermediaries in a snowy parking lot at recess or stealthily, from hand to hand, while a teacher wrote in loops on a chalkboard, until it reached me. That former me, the eight-year-old me in a navy shirt and navy pants. My hair blonde and new. I was full of love and curiosity and imagination. I was Wayne Gretzky and Gilbert Perreault. While my brothers poured gasoline on Big Wheels on the train tracks by my grandmother’s house, I read old books from the library and leafed through the old photographs of my parents. Of that time before me. There they were strong in the sunlight of the Alleghany Mountains. I am getting ahead of myself, I should slow down so as not to forget any of it. A statue of the Virgin Mary stood in a corner of our classroom with her palms outturned in mute appeal. The note folded and then folded again and then passed to me and unfolded and saved and forgotten until now. It occurs to me, all these years later, in light of Paris and San Bernardino, in light of cancer, and old age, how quickly we are here and then gone. How we try and try to hold on to the moments which keep slipping away. The edges of those memories blurring like old photographs. We live and then we disappear, we come from somewhere and then we go somewhere. In that parking lot youth of our hockey games, our sticks scraped in chops along the snow, our yells and shouts echoed off of the red wall of the school and faded as we rushed back and forth beneath a gray sky that to us was golden. The school itself, where our brothers and sisters went, and where our parents went, is closed for good now. What was the first to go? The hardware store? The bakery? The grocery store? Which building was the first to be boarded up? In those moments, the note, that had been passed to me, carried with it a monumental significance. It carried with it, not only the love of the girl who lived on Roebling Avenue, but of her existence and in turn mine too. I kept them all in a shoebox and hid them from my brothers who surely would have used them to burn bonfires on the tracks against the snow that fell and would continue to fall. I stowed them away, carefully, and then forgot about them. And then the children of that time scattered to New York, and Charlotte, and Dallas. They are in New Orleans, and Boulder, and Seattle. They are holding the hands of their mother in a hospital. They are visiting with their father in a room in Buffalo on an unseasonably warm and bright day before a holiday. In the photographs in our family albums, with notes and dates written by my mother on the back, I find my brothers again. I find my sister again. There they are as they used to be, and I can smell the gasoline on them. There is the school with the Fallout Shelter sign above the door that recessed back into the building, a perfect spot where my brothers bent to kiss the girls of their youth. Where they passed bottles of Genesee Cream Ale stolen from the refrigerators of their friends fathers, and here I am holding a cup of pop in the sunlight, and here again in the folded note of a girl whose eyes shone like wet stones. In the sweetness of a note I am reminded again of myself and that time. Of skating parties and holding the sweaty hand of a girl who wrote a note and passed it to that former me. I am reminded of that period where everything was opening and nothing was closing. Before I realized that after everything is gone, the photographs remain, the writing remains, the words remain and with them, in some small way, we remain.