Comet Dust in Valentine

Sylvia and Mark

In memory of my mother, Sylvia Estelle Daniel Dickinson, April 7, 1938 to February 14, 1972.

“Comet’s Dust Resembles Asteroid’s”  Irene Klotz, Discovery News.   “Jan. 24, 2008 — When scientists planned a mission to bring back samples of a comet to Earth, they expected to find bits of materials from the original building blocks of the solar system…”

Galaxies are being created by my mother and father’s hands. Tiny planets of wood drift into orbit and fall through a square of sunlight onto the floor, like the leaves that nourished the tree they came from. Their lazy and elegant descent is accompanied by the steady shuffling of sandpaper on church pews. It is autumn of 1963. We are in a rented storefront graced by a huge picture window where the bright, low angle of the sun creats cozy warmth, giving the freshly stripped and sanded pews the scent of the north woods on logging days. The exposed wood no doubt reminds my father of his ancestry, long invested in northern timber and land, his forbears entwined with religion, politics, and education. My mother’s memories skip to her own childhood in the south, her journalist-turned-entrepreneur father creating picture frames, the foil for calligraphic versions of the Ten Commandments beautifully rendered by her artist mother. Her father, gone now, still present in his work sprinkled in homes over the south, a silent companion to family portraits and witty sayings in the wooden frames his hands made.

They are young and beautiful. My father is in the midst of his first building project for the small congregation he shepherds in a little burg called Valentine. He is dark and handsome, a veteran of World War II, classically trained singer, motorcycle and auto enthusiast, artist and poet. My mother is 25 and newly pregnant again. She is tiny, 5’2″ with a nipped in waist and dark curly hair, a keen sense of humor and a huge love for life and music that surrounds her like a mist of lilac light. Their three soft haired daughters are playing in the sawdust around them, singing the melodies they have been taught since birth.

I am named for them, Mark and Sylvia. and I imagine this day, saved in time.

The time before.