Baby hands,

Playing hands,

Wringing hands,

Praying hands,

Housework hands,

Taking hands,

Pointing hands,

Pinching hands,

Hitting hands,

Attacking hands,

Shielding hands,

Pleading hands,

Giving hands,

Artwork hands,

Embroidery hands,

Ravioli hands,

Loving hands,

Book-holding hands,

Working hands,

Writing hands,

Old lady hands,

Praying hands.

My husband shows me the way to peace with Mom.  He bends over backwards to please her and to help me.  When Mark and I start our own family, Mom’s nurturing spirit makes our world on the 41st Parallel better.  For just about the first ime in my life, Mom and I find a common ground when my daughter is born.  She releases her inner spirit, something I never saw before, and supports us in the new roles of Mother and Father.

It is no surprise that Mom talks about Mark, years later, when she lives in a nursing home and is almost 82 years-old.

“He’s the only man who’s ever cared about me,” said Mom.

Uncle Pippi was on my mind last night.

I woke remembering this dream:

I see a beautiful woman.  She reminds me of an angel, well, the feeling of an angel, from heaven.  She has blonde hair that falls in soft waves, in the style of the 1950s.  I don’t know her.  I’ve never seen her before.  She seems very kind to me.

My husband, Mark, and I sit on Nanny’s front porch, on the slate.  There are others with us, but I’m not sure who they are ˗ maybe our children.  I feel relaxed.  We see a car, a style of the 1950s, slowly pull up alongside the sidewalk, next to the hill of Nanny’s front yard.  We watch the driver from above.  The blonde woman gets out of the car and walks up the hill easily, towards us.  She says she’s looking for a Jean DeVito, and I say that’s me.  I shake her hand.  She says someone she knows gave her this paper, as she hands a paper to me.  She says someone else, a third person, gave it to the person she knows.  She doesn’t know the third person.  She says that they just told her to find me and give me the paper.  I don’t know how she knew to find me at Nanny’s.  It feels as though it was easy for her to find me, and as though everyone knows that I can always be found at Nanny’s.

The woman turns to leave, but I don’t watch her go.

I look at the paper.  It’s a map.   It measures about 10” square.  It’s an old map, an antique, colored by age, frayed around the edges, with many fold lines, as though folded over and over again, studied many times.  I’m overwhelmed and start to cry.

I tell Mark that I had a dream about this map.

There’s a black and white sketch of the stone foundation and Uncle Pippi’s garden on the map.  It is a 2-dimensional sketch.  It is a treasure map.  The wood-sawn fence surrounds the garden.  The stones of the foundation are drawn.  There’s a shovel, and a dotted line arrow that goes through the floor of the foundation, down deep into the earth, below the garden.  There is an X marked at the bottom of a shoveled out tunnel.  It is deep in the earth, through Uncle Pippi’s garden.

I don’t feel as though there is buried treasure, like a chest of gold, in the physical aspect of the earth.  I feel as though Uncle Pippi is telling me that there is treasure in the garden, in the emotional sense.  I feel as though he’s telling me to write about the garden.

There is handwriting along the edge of the map.  It says “Pippi.”  It’s in my mother’s handwriting.  I recognize her loose writing style.  On the other side of the paper, Mom wrote a note that describes what the X mark means.

It says, “You will find love here.”