Yesterday my son was sitting on my lap and I bent down and kissed him on the nape of his neck. "That's where the angel lives," I whispered to him. And then I paused. My grandmother used to tell me that. I had forgotten all about it until it popped out of my mouth. I never really understood it, but that's what she said. I had an angel that lived in the nape of my neck. I wonder where that came from. Is it from some story or legend that my grandmother read, or just some bit from family lore or her own imagination? Do I even remember it right?
I'll have to ask my sister or my cousins. I long since learned that the little things that I thought were just between my grandparents and I often extended to the other grandchildren as well. I remember once visiting with my older cousin Rachel. She showed me a picture my grandmother had painted of her sitting on our grandfather's lap. She told me, "We used to play this game where he would tap my nose and say 'big nose', and then tap his nose and say 'little nose.'"
"Hey!" I said, "I have the big nose!"
Apparently big noses run in the family.
I've found my grandmother popping into my head frequently as I care for my son. Little things, little memories. My grandparents looked after me a lot as a little girl and Grandma was great fun. She had a creative spirit and always had a project up her sleeve that usually involved a good bit of mess and noise. I remember making space ships and ringed planets out of glass Christmas balls one year. They were decidedly un-Christmasy and covered in glitter that got all over the place. It was great.
Luke is a ways away from making Christmas ornaments that look like the planet Saturn. Right now, he's working on lifting his head on his own and making some connections with his environment around him. Sometimes he stares intently at patches of light or the cat or some bit of flotsam around the house. The other day he took to staring at the painting above the chair in his room. It's a painting of a little girl in an over-sized sun hat.
"You see that painting there?" I asked him. "That's a painting of me when I was a very little girl. Your great grandmother painted that. She was a very neat lady. She never got the chance to meet you, but she loves you all the same."
I kissed him again in that spot on the back of his neck while he stared at the painting on the wall. The spot where the angel lives.
It makes a little more sense to me now.