It is a garden, once my mother's, and now mine, where I go, when I need a place to go.
Dresses #1 and #2 belonged to my mother. Forty years after she died I returned to the house where I grew up, and brought these dresses with me.
My mother is wearing dress #1, the blue psychedelic dress, I am standing next to her, and my abuser, my sister, stands where the negative has been exposed to light.
I stood in the garden where Mom stood, trying to fit into dress #1. From my diary, December 24, 1976, age 14: I’m not protected from my sister. I don’t have a right state of mind. I don’t know what to do, or how to act.
From my diary, April 16, 1984, age 21: My mother is dead four months now, and the house I once called home must be emptied and sold. I can't return to that brown-shingled womb to pull the weeds from the garden.
From my Diary, April 16, 2022, age 60: Forty years later I can still smell the honeysuckle mixed with hatred. My sister prevented me from breathing by sitting on my chest She laughed, I suffocated.
Dress #2 The psychedelic orange dress. Mother holds our family dog who was then just a puppy. Fifteen years later they both died only days apart.
Two dresses, angels; joy and pain, exist as polarities.
Mother in the orange dress at my sixth birthday party, August 4, 1968.
Dress #3 I cherished my first party dress. It hung in my closet long after I outgrew it. A reminder that there is joy as well as pain. Half a century later I still need to know this.
From my diary, February 27, 1983 My grandmother is losing touch with reality. Mother worries because she forgets to turn off the stove. Mother worries because she faints in the Brooklyn heat. Mother worries because she forgets her daughters face. I’m worried, as I bow my branches and bear my fruit, for I am the seed and they are my roots.
Dress # 4 I look just like my great grandmother Wasserman. She wore floor length black muslin dresses, even in the summer, spoke only Yiddish, and cooked chicken soup every day of her life. She came to America because the Cossacks ravaged, looted, raped, and killed; causing generational trauma which has been passed along our maternal line as we draw the skirts of our dresses across the centuries.
The rotten tomatoes of the new world.
Anger and joy, unchanged as the basement forty years later.