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Laurel Moffatt remembers there are some things that go together like bread and butter. Like a grandmother and a grandchild, forgiveness and grace.
The clarity the desert brings. Hurricanes and hard relationships. Finding reason in the middle of a ruin. Small Wonders are quiet but profound observations about life from Dr. Laurel Moffatt. In each fifteen-minute episode, Laurel uncovers lessons learned from broken and beautiful things that are polished to perfection and set in rich audio landscapes for your consideration.
I inherited three things from my grandmother - a bread plate engraved in a flourishing script, a tarnished silver butter dish, and a set of instructions for washing my hands. A little while ago I threw the butter dish away. I then went looking for the bread plate to do the same. I found it and felt a small twinge of remorse. I fished the butter dish out of the trash and set it back on the kitchen counter.
People say there’s no such thing as ghosts. But people who say that never met my grandmother. I’ve spent a generous portion of my life haunted by her. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I recently returned to the house where she lived.
When she lived here it was a small, dingy, home on a busy road in Baton Rouge. The house is still small, the road still busy. Back then there was nowhere to play and nothing to play with, except her pots and pans, and very rarely, her costume jewellery in her dark cave of a bedroom, where the curtains were always drawn, the window air conditioner always on with its rumble and hum. Southern politeness would say she was difficult. Honesty would say something more.
Throughout my early childhood I overheard many conversations about a woman who’d passed through our town years earlier. It seemed that she’d crossed paths with everyone we knew in the South. Even family members several states away had had some dealings with her. And no one had anything good to say about her.
The accounts of her arrival and departure, although varied, shared an unsettling theme: destruction. I remember wondering why she would destroy things like that. And I’m not talking about destruction in the abstract. She was a literal homewrecker. With every story I heard, I wondered how a single person could create such havoc, such devastation in people's lives and homes.
I eventually came to understand that the woman people were talking about was not a person, but a hurricane. Hurricane Camille. 1969. Category 5. This was the hurricane that people in the South in the 1970s and 80s spoke of with the kind of awe, the kind of fear, the kind of deep loathing that people now speak of Katrina. Not every hurricane is a Camille. But the damage such hurricanes can do (and did) is bad enough to make a person fear any hurricane, all hurricanes.
Sometimes there are difficult people in families who crash in and out of lives with the regularity of hurricane season. And occasionally, there are members who, like Camille or Katrina, tear through and destroy everything they can get their hands on, seemingly without reason. This was my grandmother. It pains me to say it. Partly because of the pain that she caused so many people in my family. And partly because I would very much like to have another story to tell. But I don’t. So I will tell my own, strange story.
She was impulsive. And fun. And terrifying. She was patient. And kind. And horrible. And cruel. She was all of these things. She hit, stole and lied and also spent hours teaching me the words to songs like “After the Ball” and “You are my Sunshine.” She taught me to say “bread and butter” any time we had to stop holding hands because something was in the way (a street sign, a park bench, a person) and then join them up again on the other side. If you say ‘bread and butter’ before you part, you’ll always come back together, she’d say. Why? Because bread and butter go together.
She ran the red lights that I pointed out to her - I was very young, but old enough to know that red meant “stop”. “Not for me it doesn’t,” she’d mutter as she slammed her foot on the gas and threw her arm across my bony chest as we flew through the intersection of Lee and Perkins in her white Chevy Impala as big as a boat. It was her arm thrown across my chest as a seatbelt that told me I was precious, the same arm that when it struck told me I was not.
She taught me the steps to her beauty routine: how to clean dentures, shave chin hairs, and draw eyebrows with a brow pencil. I haven’t made much use of her tips, but there is something that she taught me that I use every single day: how to wash my hands.
Her technique was as exacting as the most rigorous of hand washing instructions that circulated online with the outbreak of COVID. There is the use of soap, and warm water as hot as you can stand it, and washing your hands twice or three times as long as you think you need to, and the use of paper towels rather than a dryer.
The ritual was not merely about cleaning your hands; it was about having a plan. She’d question me about what I would touch after I washed them. How was I going to get out of the bathroom? Would I touch the door? Look where that woman just wiped her nose with her hand and then put her hand on the door, and now you’re going to touch it? And then touch your face? Think again, she’d tell me.
I’ve spent most of my life divesting myself of her inheritance, unschooling myself from her lessons in cruelty, as well as her obsessive hygiene practices. But when the directives started pouring in at the beginning of this pandemic on how to wash your hands, my goodness she came flooding back.
I have always wondered how she became the person she was. There are no obvious answers for how a girl goes from being a member of a well-respected family in a small town in South Carolina to a woman on the wrong side of the law whose treatment of her own children swung between deep neglect and abject cruelty.
As I grew up washing my hands as she taught me to, I wondered if it wasn’t germs I was hoping to wash off, but her. Maybe she was the contagious thing, a virus that could be transmitted down a family line. And I wondered as I grew if one day I’d look around and realise that, just like her, I’d blown up my own life and hurt those closest to me. I’ve spent many years washing my own hands, figuratively speaking, in order to wash my hands of her. Forgiveness of my grandmother seemed impossible. I couldn’t imagine ever being able to do it.
There are references to washing as a symbol of cleanliness in literature and in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures it is also a metaphor for forgiveness. One of my favourites is in a song written by a long-ago king after he blew up his own life and destroyed the lives of those around him. It’s Psalm 51 from the biblical Scriptures, written in the 10th century BCE.
He sings about washing, but not as a how-to or set of washing instructions. Instead, he asks God to wash him. His lyrics are a plea. Wash me. I can’t do it myself. I’ve messed myself right up. Clean me and I will be clean. All of me. From the inside out.
I find such hope in this…the idea that there is a God who can do it, who wants to do it, but also that a destroyed life is not the end, that there’s hope for a life, even in the rubble of it. And there is help too, I’ve found, in doctors and therapists and family and friends.
Through all of this I’ve found my grandmother’s legacy loosen. Even as I am reminded of her every time I wash my hands. And I’ve realised something about her. My grandmother was born in 1906, making her 12 or 13 when her small town was hit by the Spanish flu. She would have heard how fast that virus moved, how many it took. She may have seen people die, and she would have known of many more who did. This is when she learned how to wash her hands. This is when she memorised the instructions that she later taught me. Now when I wash my hands, I think about her as a young girl with dark hair and all her bad choices up ahead of her, washing her hands 100 years ago with soap and water as hot as she can stand it. I think about what she left me and what I will leave my own children besides washing instructions. I pray that it is kindness.
Sometimes I find myself humming After the Ball is Over when I’m walking somewhere, usually in autumn. And when my children were all very small I sang You are my Sunshine to them almost every night. And when I’m walking with my youngest child and we have to pull our hands apart because of a street sign or a park bench that she wants to climb, I whisper “bread and butter” and sometimes I say it loud enough for her to hear as well. I think she heard me say it the other day in the grocery store. We were standing in the bread aisle waiting to check out. As we waited I heard a song threading its way out of the store’s speakers. It was “It’s Quiet Uptown” from the musical Hamilton. There is a word that is repeated in the song: ‘unimaginable’. I’ve heard the song many times, and until recently I would have said that the unimaginable thing referred to is the ‘suffering too terrible to name’ the loss of a child, the horror and grief of death. And it is that, but it is also this: forgiveness.