JPG: Stories: Photo Essay: In My Mother's Footsteps

In My Mother's Footsteps

By Robea Patrowicz

18 May 2008

I took a walk through 1946. I walked straight through till 1954. I borrowed my mother's memories. I borrowed her eyes, her heart, and her footsteps as she guided me on a journey she called the past.

We started in Rogers, Connecticut. I watched her as she sat outside the picnic bench at Good Year Elementary, saw the swings she used to play on as a child, took in the old brick building with all of it's innocent memories. Looking across the street to Saint Ignatius Catholic Church, I saw the place where her faith was born. She was baptized there on December 8th, 1946. When we entered through the church doors I saw the past come back to her in a wave, and I watched as she cried.

Further down the road in Rogers, we visited the home she lived at from age three till age six. Before us stood an old white house, which used to be brown. I listened as she recalled the colors, people and sounds of her past. I heard with her the laughter in the bedroom as she and her friend painted the walls with their hands, and felt the 'oh no' moment as they got scolded by her friend's mom. We drove onward down a street she had walked, a neighborhood foreign to me, but to her an old acquaintance.

Danielson was where Holy Cross French Cemetery held loved ones of her past. Here lied Uncle Frank, godfather to her second son, the late Stephen Vincent. I saw her look upon his stone and felt her ask him to take her boy's hand. And in my heart I heard him say 'yes'.

Across the street was a grinder shop my mom used to go as a child and would return to as a teenager. The good ole' Riverside Grinder. I imagined some Norman Rockwell moment with a big chocolate milkshake and two straws. 1950's true romance.

On Cady Street in Danielson we saw two houses. The first was where her meme and pepe, Cordeila and Rudolph Paquette lived. A house built by their sons during the depression. She told me in tears about the day she walked through the side door of the house, right below the octagon window. Her meme Cordeila shouted in joy, 'my Theresa', mistaking my mother for her deceased daughter. 'You look just like my Theresa', she said.

A stone's throw away sat a tiny little house where my grandmother Robea, her mother, lived with her father, Rudolph, and her older brother, Willy. It was one year before she was born, in 1945.

The last, most powerful memory lay in Sacred Heart Cemetery, in Wauregan, where Robea Marguerite and Rudolph Antoine, her beloved parents, rest in peace. I watched her kneel between the two stones. I tried to imagine what it must feel like to face your parents' in such a distant way. I didn't want to know the feeling. Looking at her, with the sun shining on her hair, the selfless, devoted mother, I couldn't bear even the thought.

We got back in the car and drove towards Massachusetts, our present home. I realized the journey of my mother's life has been filled with joy, sorrow, laughter, anger and all the emotions that make us human. I realized that 60 years could go by in the blink of an eye. It was true in my mothers' face. She saw the things that remained, but she too saw so much more than I was able to capture, than I was even able to see. She saw the photographs within her heart.

I hope to bring a little of that home to her.