(or, Mommy, Where do Stories Come From?)
I visited my favorite gravestone today. It’s an obelisk, with birth and death dates for ten people on its four sides. Three generations of the Riddle-Field family, from the 1818 birth of Hannah Riddle (no maiden name given) to grandson James Riddle Field’s death on March 1, 1904.
This obelisk is the oldest gravestone in Mount Salem Cemetery, a few blocks from my house in Wilmington, Delaware. It caught my eye right away the first time I saw the cemetery – first because it’s so tall, and second because it’s so old by Midwestern standards. I moved here from Minnesota and all their dead people are a lot newer than little four-year-old Hannah Riddle, named for her mother, who died in 1844.
Just four years old. I examined the other dates, and tried to piece together this heartbreaking familial puzzle. Hannah lived to be 70, and bore her namesake, twins Leander and Mary, Elizabeth, John, and Jeannie. Only Leander and Jeannie lived past the age of five.
Hannah lived until 1888, long enough to see her daughter Jeannie’s mourn two newborns, but not long enough to watch her grandson James grow up.
Hannah and Jeannie, mother and daughter, haunt me now.
The Hunk of Stone or the Dusty Attic?
Michelangelo said of his creative process, “In every stone I see a statue, as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action.”
The blank page? I only wish. For me, things collect in the dark crevices in my brain – objects or phenomena I love, past events that obsess me, news items that make me think “what if?”, people whose scenarios I want to fix, places that bring me peace or scare me out of my skin.
They accumulate there, gathering dust and cobwebs, until the moment when a few random items gravitate toward each other and beget a story.
An Italian Deruta ceramic cat, my grandmother’s small embroidered purse, my failure to grow my hair long like my sister’s – a new fairy tale. A friend’s teenaged niece whose mother had ovarian cancer, a thing for the Northern Lights, a boarding school, some shameful Minnesota history – a YA ghost story. A van full of college students skids into the path of a semi on a road coated with ice turns into what if, and then to not a whodunnit, but a howdoIstophimfromdoingitagain?
Pesky Riddles!
Now I can’t stop thinking about the Riddle-Fields. Hannah’s son Leander also lived to adulthood, dying in France at age 40. He was the only son of a wealthy, prominent Wilmington family – so why leave the country? I Google wars – nada. Then I look at the dates on the gravestone again. Leander was 26 when his sister’s first newborn died; 29 when his infant niece passed. This was the Age of Mourning; Prince Albert died in 1861, and Queen Victoria turned bereavement into an art form. Our Civil War lasted from 1861 to ’64, giving Victoria plenty of company. Maybe Leander just couldn’t handle the family’s gloom? Maybe…
Shoo, you Riddles! Find yourselves a nice dusty corner and sit still so the spiders can do their work. I’m not ready to make up answers to all your what ifs.