She lived in my mother's basement for years, and in my grandparents' before that. Now she is home with my brother and his family. I am so glad she survived the cull.
Mom's house is finally empty, everything from that life and from those of generations before has been cleared, distributed, redistributed, and otherwise scattered to the four winds. Mom sent some items to museums; my brother held on to correspondence and other historical items for possible donation to museums or universities or other archives. I have some things. My grandparents lived in bold times and my grandfather was in the thick of it, from the founding of Czechoslovakia in Tomas Masaryk's administration, through the war years, to the Partition of Czechoslovakia and Benes's government-in-exile while Hitler occupied the country, to those awful years following the war when the country was overtaken by the Soviet sphere of influence. Mom helped Czech and Slovak historians with their research by providing correspondence, photographs, and her remembrances.
Mrs. Lipa was an opera singer, and a sculptor made a bust of her. That's about all we know. The bust had pride of place among artifacts in the basement. I have no idea how the bust came to be there, but Mom wanted us to remember her name, and so she wrote (over her heart) "Mrs. Lipa."
I remember as we were going through the house in the aftermath of Mom's death, my brother and I looked at the sculpture and asked, "What are we going to do with Mrs. Lipa?" We let the question hang for two years, but she remains with the family.
Tomorrow Has Become Yesterday is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.
Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.
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