Pauline Underhill died on February 11th, 2021. She was 66. Two years later, a bench sits where she once did, beside the edge of a mill pond where coots chatter and crocus’ bloom. The engraving reads, “a quiet place to sit and remember the sunshine and smiles you filled our hearts with.”
I never knew her. I just walked past the bench last Thursday. A mallard nipped at the back of my boots as my boyfriend and I fed them. We laughed, watched the ripples in the pond water, squinted slightly as the sunlight streaked across our view. That’s when I noticed the words on the bench.
Remember the sunshine, it said.
“Ben,” I cried when I first read it. Then I asked, “do you think the sunshine remembers her?”
Do you? Does it? Remember her?
Remember the way she stood at the bus stop? Which eye watered first when she cried. How she stacked the dishes after washing up and the way her teeth popped out when she smiled. Does the sun remember her favourite album? What house she was in at school? The look on her face the first time she saw a snowfall? The sun has watched her every day, read the loving messages in birthday cards from friends, followed her from bed to bathroom to beyond the seas, and seen her heart glow several shades brighter than the core of its own self.
“I do,” Ben replied. He pulled me into him, my head against his heart. “I think it does.”
Yeah. The sun remembers her.
The air remembers her. The wind remembers her. The oceans remember her. The pond does, the gravel too, neighbouring it, with her footprints immortalised in the Earth below. The ducks remember her. The leaves do. The bench. The dates between 1954 and 2021 remember her, think fondly of her, carry her in every moment and person and place and sentence and spoonful and cheek kissed within them.
I remember her - though I never knew her - and as the sun pierces through the curtains against my windows, I see her in it. In the photons of light, there’s her smile. In the dust caught in the sunlit ribbon, look, see, it’s her and she’s sparkling. In the blinding beauty of a too-bright ball of gas is the blinding reminder that Pauline Underhill existed. Out loud and in full and for all the world to see. Nothing can change that.
And when the sun rises, then sets, I think to myself, Pauline Underhill didn’t die that day. She returned to the sky that day.
Pauline Underhill is not under the hill at all. She’s shining 147.83 million kilometres above it.
Pauline Underhill, on February 11th 2021, became the whole entire sun, herself.
If you remember the sunshine, you’ll find her there, beaming.
About the Creator
em
I’m a writer, a storyteller, a lunatic. I imagine in a parallel universe I might be a caricaturist or a botanist or somewhere asleep on the moon — but here, I am a writer, turning moments into multiverses and making homes out of them.
The Voyeur's Incandescent Reasoning
The woman sat nonplussed, in the Waiting Room. In a sort of daze, looking straight ahead patiently. She had already had three small breakfast's that morning and a nip of sherry, this was not unusual she would typically wait until an hour after she took her anti-depressant and was her morning routine. She was merely following instructions she assured herself, shifted slightly in her seat and feeling a little heart burn thought, maybe she should skip lunch. Dom had said to have the task done this week. She was well used to his methods and desired to get this over and done with soon. She glanced at her watch, smiled weakly at the Receptionist who was there for a moment and then gone.
By Canuck Scriber L.Lachapelle Author2 days ago in Fiction
Comments (2)
Your story songs like a song it is so beautiful
Beautiful ruminations, bright & uplifting. At the base of our son's tombstone are words from one of his favorite musicals: "Because I knew you, I have been changed for good." (Wicked) It's approaching eleven years now, & there is not a day that goes by where the truth of those words are not made real to us all over again, in our lives & in the lives of all those who knew him.