A note, before I go

A message from the Mothership

I am a word person. Shocking, I know. While I work against that being synonymous with wordy, it appears there is a strong correlation. With my family, this proclivity manifests in frequent, paper-based offerings, diminutive dispatches for when I'm not home to impart such information verbally.

More succinctly, I leave a lot of notes. I scribble down practical tidbits like reminders, lunch ideas, and messages about my whereabouts. I dash off cheerful morsels in hopes of brightening someone’s day. The custom is an unexpected gift born of a long-ago tragedy.

I was in third grade, on the bus home from school. One stop before mine, young Paul, a neighbor who was a grade below me, was struck and killed by the same bus. Every kid there felt it happen and witnessed the aftermath. Terrified, I sprinted home only to discover myself completely alone.

Though latchkey kids were a known issue back then, it was rare for me to be greeted by an empty house. Distraught, I called family friends, thinking my mom might be there. She wasn’t, but they came and stayed with me until my mother returned. I learned later that she had set off on a quick errand that took much longer than planned. She felt terrible for being gone at such a crucial time.

That’s when the notes started. From then on, anytime Mom thought us kids might get home before her, she left a memo detailing where and how to find her, typically including a location, phone number, and estimated time of return. We were expected to do the same.

Years later, with my own young family, I continued the tradition. I persisted even after the advent of mobile phones, when the habit stopped serving any essential purpose. At some point, expectation alone became the driver.

Case in point: When my kids were bona fide, cell-carrying teens, I launched a project that took me to the same place, every afternoon, for a week. I made a big announcement about where I'd be, to alleviate concern when my children, inevitably, arrived home from school to find me gone. And still, I left notes.

Several days into this pattern, I skipped out without first penning any sort of message. A call came in that afternoon, my older daughter’s voice on the other end of the line registering slight panic.

“Are you okay?! Where are you?! You didn’t leave a note!!”

Another day, running late and caught in the crosshairs of my self-made commitment, I grabbed a mottled, recycled square of paper and scrawled: Here it is. A note from the Mothership. I finished it off with a little musical note and a smiley face.

The whole scenario got such a laugh that the note ended up laminated and was given a permanent home in our kitchen junk drawer. It was called into service anytime I didn’t have something more informative to write, or when I ran out of time for anything more meaningful.

Years passed. The kids left home. The cadence of my responsibilities shifted. Out of the blue, a text message arrived asking if I still had the Mothership Message. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I’d been on a does-not-spark-joy cleaning bender, and the junk drawer was a recent target.

I sifted through paper and pens, looked under various trays and dividers, installed to improve my organizational game, but I came up empty. When asked about any sightings of our little laminated memento, my other half just shrugged. That either meant he hadn’t seen it, or that he was smart enough to hide the fact that he didn't even recall it ever existing.

I continued to cogitate. Despite the recent purge, I knew that note would have given me pause. Put less delicately, there's no way in hell I would have discarded it on purpose. Goodness knows, it brought me joy!

I was standing at the kitchen counter massaging the brain cells I have left when a voice in my head said, "What happens if something falls out the back of a drawer?" Seeking affirmation I didn’t actually need, because I already knew the answer, I posed the same question to my husband.

"What happens if something falls out the back of a drawer?"

"It lands in the next drawer,” he replied, exactly as I’d anticipated he would.

“But, what if it doesn't?"

Catching on, he made an attempt to answer and mollify at the same time. "I guess it could.. But, I doubt..."

"How do you take out the bottom drawer?" I pressed.

He bent over, reached down, and squeezed a little trigger on the underside of that drawer, the one where I keep my spice jars, four down from the top. Extending it six inches beyond its usual stopping point, he squatted and squinted into the dark cavity.

"There's definitely a piece of paper in there,” he offered, “but, it looks like instructions for something."

Straining to sound less impatient than I felt, I said, more slowly than necessary. "Could you…please...just take it..all the way out?"

Dutifully, he removed the drawer from its frame and finally stepped aside to let me look. Three old Ziploc bags, two grocery-style plastic bags, a short list on a 2" square piece of paperboard. And...the Mothership.

First, there was the rush of having solved the mystery. Then, a delightful flashback to comings and goings of days gone by. But the most satisfying feeling of all was knowing that my intuition had led me exactly where I needed to go.

Instructions for something, indeed.

~Elizabeth

…Hope to see you again next week for Part Two! Bok-bok.