The Tiny Tee Shirt Size 3 — 12/13/2022 by djl
It is up on a shelf over her head, the box marked ‘Keepsakes.’ She gets the stool to avoid self-harm in taking down the weight of the box. Right there in the garage, she stares at the label in her lovely handwriting of decades ago. “Keepsakes” it says. For the sake of keeping what has already come and gone…..are the words she adds to the label, but only in her mind. Are the moments really gone? she wonders. She doesn’t think so, because that is the very mission here this day. Not gone, just different. Just changed. Just moving along.
Opening the box releases the smell of history, a scent of past happenings, yellowing school-lined pages scribbled with waxy crayons, earthy-leather smell of tiny moccasins for a three-year-old foot of chubby little toes, airplane glue of the model Ace Flyer, the balsa wood pinewood derby race car, fossilized play-dough teddybear figurine and chalky plaster baby hand impression.
Before touching anything, before finding what what she needs to lift out, she hovers over the boxed bouquet, the potpourri of raised children. Then, she takes from the home-made wooden bowl on top of it all, the macaroni necklace with its broken-teeth pieces threaded onto fuzzy thick blue yarn. In between the shells, tubes and elbow-shaped pasta, are little paper cut-outs with wildly-shaped crayon letters spelling out words. One word per cut-out; heart, square, triangle, circle. But they aren’t just ‘words,’ they are ‘people.’ “Mom.” “Dad.” “Sister.” “Brother.” She feels the rush rise up from her chest, to her throat to her eyes and now everything is hot — face, neck, hands.
Putting back the necklace and setting aside the wooden bowl, she moves her hand down through the layer of Stride-Rite shoes, all scuffed from the stumbling first steps of walking, tripping and falling, the tattered board book “Land of Colors,” the ragged terrycloth rabbit, the wind-up carousel horse music box. . . . to where the white sleeve of that tiny tee shirt size 3, sticks out. That is what she is wanting from this box. Without disturbing other contents of the ‘Keepsake’ box, which is itself mangled at the corners from 30 some years of moving, and ripped at the flaps from a hundred reopenings, she softly tugs the sleeve enough to pull the shirt out without harming it.
‘Ahhh, it is time now,’ she says aloud to no one. She unfolds the tiny tee shirt size 3, and draws in breath at the primary colors of hearts and stars and the fabric-painted stick figure with orange hair, and little painted hand-prints. The words “I LOVE YOU” are printed in all caps. She thinks she probably wrote that, but it could have been anybody. The tiny tee shirt size 3 now becomes crushed against her chest, but only after she cups it to her face, as though she is wanting to inhale the essence of the little person who colored that cloth with size 3 hands, and wore it for that little span of time, so long ago.
She closes up the box without the tiny tee shirt in it, puts the box back on the shelf with the ‘Keepsakes’ label showing for next time, and tucks the size 3 into her tote bag that always goes along with her to the grandchild’s house. ‘Better go there soon,’ she thinks, ‘because they don’t stay small for very long. It all changes so fast.’ And that thought starts slivers of shine down her cheeks, which makes it hard to see where she is going on her way back into the house. But then again, as her grown son once said, when learning about partings and changes, “Every goodbye is a hello somewhere else.” Or something to that effect. She laughs at not remembering the exact quote, which then squeezes the rain from her vision so she can walk steady and not fall and break a hip or anything that will keep her from delivering the tiny tee-shirt to the next size 3 beloved person. The words “I LOVE YOU” coming from and going to — a whole new generation with just as much love in that ‘word’.
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