Written by Mac Carey
“Cremation is allowed for Catholics now,” my mother excitedly tells me, while relaying
her end-of-life plans. But I know that I must be lowered into the earth in a wooden coffin.
My childhood ballet lessons were in the brick tower of a nineteenth-century Masonic
lodge, with a carpentry shop underneath and uneven floorboards that bent and jumped more than
the dancers. I would pull on my tights before class in the cathedral-ceilinged bathroom,
imagining roughness seeping into the space the way scent does, those wood chips and raw boards
creating tiny tears in the weave of my tights.
All these years later, capricious egg doorknobs and the smell of freshly sanded wood
make me think of eight-counts and pliés. Maybe there really were tiny tears from those rough
boards, and they left their mark on my psyche, like the visceral rush of olfactory nostalgia when I
lift my First Communion veil from my mother’s cedar chest, entombed alongside Halloween
capes and high-necked bridesmaid dresses.
Wood—unlike the relentlessness of stone or metal—was once alive. Like us. When a
tree’s innards are riven, the ringed map of life is revealed along the stripped face. These trees’
lives are longer than ours, but they still came to an eventual end. Though in death their corpses
have the dignity of being serviceable, which is more than most of us can say.
A few years ago, I began replacing my starter furniture with respectable pieces, lifelong
investments kept in tandem until severance via death and an estate sale. The first piece I acquired
was a mahogany armoire. Its swirling helixes will work themselves into my own story.
Just like the cheap midcentury wood-paneling of my living room, unpainted and in places
shining where decades of fingertips polished it to marble. But the patterns persisted, and now
those whorls—one a hooded wizard whose nose poked from the shadowy folds, another an
alligator opening his tapered mouth, many mournful eyes—mark my life just as much as theirs.
.
Mac Carey‘s nonfiction work has appeared in Texas Monthly, Washingtonian, Halfway Down the Stairs, and forthcoming in Oxford American. She lives in Virginia in a 170-year old house with no bedroom closets but one possible ghost.