The Memory of Love

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Scientists say memory is a tricky thing. I’ve read a couple of studies which claim smells are the strongest triggers for recall. And it’s certainly true that when I opened the 70-or 80-year old suitcase we inherited from my husband’s aunt in Corpus Christi, the smell of salt air wafted into the room. I was transported to her home on the shores of the Gulf Coast which featured a long span of green grass leading down to a worn dock with a couple of boats tied to it. Beyond was an endless of expanse of water meeting the horizon. But for me, regardless of the pull of familiar scents, the strongest impressions of recall seem to be grounded in emotion.

Son #1 had a prodigious memory. He was almost five when we moved from Cedar City to Salt Lake so my husband could take his first teaching job. We stayed several weeks with close friends–who also had four children–until our new house was finished. Every night her husband and mine would line up their kids and ours, youngest first, and plop them under the shower, scrub them down, dry them off, and pass them to we two moms for jammies, toothbrushing, and bedtime. Our friend Carl was a seminary teacher, so he took every opportunity to teach his children about the scriptures. The last item at bedtime was a Bible or Book of Mormon story he played on an old fashioned tape recorder.

When we finally moved into our new home in Kearns, our neighborhood was growing at the rate of five families a week. Every Sunday it seemed like the congregation had exploded again. One afternoon our Bishop stopped me in the hall and said he’d asked Son #1 to speak in Sacrament meeting the next Sunday.

“What?” I said, dumbfounded. “You want my five year old to give a talk in church?’

“Yep. Just have him repeat the talk he gave in Junior Sunday School this morning.” (Those were the old days before the consolidated schedule—when Sunday School was in the morning, and we came back for Sacrament Meeting in the afternoon. Be grateful for the change!) Then he rushed off to meet the new folks who had shown up at church that day.

I was shocked. I didn’t know Son #1 had been assigned a talk, much less given one. When I quizzed him about it later, he said, “I talked about David and Goliath. You know—that giant guy.” He did speak in church the next Sunday–a five minute almost word-for-word retelling of the story he’d listened to at bedtime a few weeks before. The audience was mesmerized; so was I.

That was the memory which appeared without any conscious thought on my part when years later, I was sitting in an ultra-small branch of the church in a little village in Costa Rica. My children had given my husband and I round trip tickets to pick up Son #5 when he finished his mission. Son #4 and his new wife, Sons #’s 3 and 6, and Daughters #’s 1 and 2 joined us. The eight of us careened around the country for seven days in two little Nissans with Son #5 and Son #4 (who was also fluent in Spanish after a mission in Argentina) each driving a car.

It was the adventure of a lifetime. One day we drove for a couple of hours on a barely existent dirt road up the side of one of the country’s famous volcanoes, forged four small bridgeless streams on the way to our cabins, felt the rumble of the restless volcano as it spewed lava down its opposite side into a waiting lake, and took a picture of a moth which was bigger than Son #4’s hand—no small creature as Son #4 is 6’ 8” and can easily palm a basketball.

We spent a day in the jungle on a very small boat where we were blasted with the noise of thousands of monkeys chattering in the deep forest on both sides of the river, watched millions of rainbow colored birds settle in the trees above us, and ventured into the middle of a crowd of a couple of hundred crocodiles floating past us. (Disturbing.) We took a trip across the country from ocean to ocean—the absolute scariest traffic I’ve ever experienced: two lanes with semi’s passing each other on the unpaved shoulders at 60 miles an hour—worse than the circle round the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Son # 5 also took us to church. I was surprised to find it was an actual church-constructed building—one of those early prototypes which was designed to grow as the congregation grew. At that moment it was still a small meeting room, a bishop/branch president’s office, and a couple of classrooms. Though it had been awhile since Son #5 had worked in this branch, he was greeted with cries of delight when he appeared. He introduced us, and we were immediately embraced as part of the family.

As church began, our crowd of eight almost doubled the size of the audience. That Sunday was the Primary program. There were no more than seven children—total. I didn’t know much Spanish, but we sang in English, and no one seemed to mind. The children were wide-eyed at the strangers in the audience. They spoke simple parts and sang the songs my children had grown up with. When one of them stumbled or couldn’t remember a part, I unconsciously learned forward in support. So did the other half-dozen mothers in the room.

Part-way through the program, as I randomly scanned the small audience, I caught the eye of what was obviously the mother of a three or four year-old little girl. The little one had her finger in her mouth and hadn’t said a word or sung a single lyric, but she stood when the other children sang and smiled shyly. There were tears in her mother’s eyes. Mine, too. From across the room, the mother nodded at me. Into my mind flashed the day many years past when my five-year-old had spoken in church. I smiled back at her, both our cheeks wet with tears. Not language, or distance, nor national borders could separate us. We were bound together by love.