Legacy by Chelsea Temple
My mother wants the curio cabinet in the living room. My uncle has already laid claim to the bedroom suite in the guest room. Everyone is picking and choosing amongst her things like buzzards over something dead in the road. Mom and Uncle Terry are the buzzards. They will get the largest piece of what is hers. My cousins, great aunts and uncles are the things that come after, the field mice, opossums, and raccoons that will sneak out to the road in the middle of the night, dodging headlights and predators to pick at what is left.
I am the asphalt beneath the body, soaking up the blood, begging the sky to hold off the rain. The house seems abuzz with activity. People move from room to room with boxes and packing tape. It is starting to smell like Lysol as my great aunt, Maggie, goes around spraying every surface she can. She wipes at a small desk now, rubbing so hard into the wood that I think she could scrub right through the surface. Who needs Jackie Chan when you have my aunt Maggie and her elbow grease of steel?
They are working from the ground up, making sure to keep each other in sight so no one tries to pocket photographs, coins, or other small keepsakes. Everything must go. Everything that made her who she was must be stripped, sold, separated.
So, knowing that they are here, I move up.
The stairs creak in a familiar pattern, and the smell of her is still strong up here. I race faster to get away from the smell of disinfectant. Then, I see it. It’s still there by our window.
She used to say that it was the perfect spot for reading. “All you need is three things to have a perfect reading spot: a good book, good lighting, and a good chair to sit in.” I’m almost afraid to touch it now. It seems like a holy artifact from one of those huge churches in England, but there is no rope separating it from the normal people. There’s no separation between the extraordinary and the simple.
The dark wood of the rocking chair is marred here and there with nicks. The scratches on the right arm are where my great-great-grandfather used to whittle toys for his children. A slab in the seat is loose where my mother stood on it too forcefully as she practiced her “sword fighting” with my uncle. The sides are dinged from being moved from one side of the country to the other when my grandmother followed my grandfather when he joined the military. They could buy everything else new when they got their new house, but this chair could not be replaced. So, they took it.
And I know that underneath the chair if I looked, I would find a rainbow of colors done by my own hand. I thought that she would be angry with me when she saw it, but instead, she just smiled. She pulled me into her, put me on her lap, and told me stories of all the people who had sat in that chair before me. She told me of her father and of her grandmother. She told me of my grandfather who I never really got to know. She told me stories of my mother that I would have never heard from anyone else. She told me other stories too.
She told me about the shepherd boy and the giant. She told me about the wisest king the world has ever known. And she told me about the child who was born in the inn. She told me about how the child who no one had room for became the man who would save the world.
Here in this chair, and in this place, she taught me the word of God. She shared her faith with me. This chair, this spot is where I learned how to love.
And suddenly, I’m crying.
I hold tightly onto the wood as if it is her arm. Her smell lingers in the air and light from the sun shines in through the window, hitting my skin. It feels like the warmth of her hand.
“Honey,” my mother calls, and when I don’t respond she says it again, but this time more urgently, “Honey!” Soon, the whole house has joined her upstairs. The collected group stare at me as I grieve. Slowly, things start to slip from their hands. My mother drops the box that she has been carrying around. My uncle disregards the post that he has been using to mark things as “his”.
One by one the things that my grandmother left behind hit the floor as the people she left behind rush to comfort her true legacy. And then, I feel her.
Chelsea Temple is an English teacher from East Tennessee. Her favorite part of having a relationship with the Lord is that she always has someone to see her classic "side-eye" look. She believes that the Lord appreciates her humor while she tries to appreciate all of his. She attends Lyons Park Missionary Baptist in Church Hill, Tennessee.