“It’s the memories of care that strike me
in a different, deeper place.”
– from “On Memories and Acts of Care”
I’m pleased to share my recent piece “On Memories and Acts of Care,” which appeared in The Polk Street Review 2025, where it was awarded the 2025 Award of Merit (Best in Book) prize. Read on for more on a certain kind of memory …
Behind the veil, beneath the curtain, through the door that opens even just a crack, I find myself seeing more than I used to see. Perhaps it’s a gift of age. Every direction I turn, I notice the past winking at me from somewhere just beyond the present.
At the intersection of State Roads 32 and 38 in Noblesville, Indiana, sits a little strip mall. It’s had many updates over the years, but I can still see where my father’s drug store used to be. I have a scar on my right knee from all the times when, going with my mother to visit him at work, I’d trip and fall at the entrance threshold. The bloody knees didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the visits, though. I remember so many times skipping ahead of my mother into the store, eager to see that proud-Dad smile I knew my father would wear when he saw me. He had me honestly believing that I was bringing him a treat in the simple act of showing up.
Of course, that was years ago. The drug store was bought out by one chain and then another. Businesses have come and gone. And yet, I can still almost see the old drug store with its red and white lit-up sign above the glass front door. I can still see my father’s smile from behind the pharmacy counter. Even with the passage of all this time, I find that time, and that place, and my father’s care still smiling at me from across the years – intangible, vivid, inviting.
I catch these glimpses, and it’s not only my father’s face I see. Other pasts pop up here and there, and while some hold unpleasant memories, it’s the memories of care that strike me in a different, deeper place.
Several times a week I ride my bike along a wooded trail near my home. Sometimes I don’t see another person the entire time I’m there, but I invariably notice signs of where they’ve been. Brush is cleared. Trailside grass is trimmed. Honeysuckle is cut back and covered in garbage bags to keep the invasive growth under control. Self-appointed volunteers clearly pour hours into that place.
One day I showed up there after a storm and rode cautiously, knowing trail damage lingers long after mud dries. And yet I found debris already cleared. Someone had taken a chain saw to a fallen tree, removing middle segments blocking the trail. I almost rode by with a passing “thank you” to the universe, but then I stopped. Looking closer at an exposed side of wood, I saw what had caught my attention. A chainsaw artist had carved a smiley face into the fallen tree. Slashes for eyes, gouge for a nose, rough mouth with both corners turned up – it smiled at me. I smiled, too, and kept smiling for miles afterward, grateful for a place that manifested care like that.
Spaces speaking “care” draw me back again and again. They whisper of a certain kind of past. Body, mind, imagination – I’m caught by the feel of these places where care has lived.
My grandmother used to live on a hilltop outside of Mooresville, Indiana. She dreamed of creating a bird sanctuary in her back yard and the woods beyond it. She’d wear this glad expression as we walked around the yard and filled her birdfeeders. The skin at the edge of her eyes would crinkle with a smile as I helped her clean the bird baths. She’d take me to see the latest flower she’d planted, and then her gaze would take in the yard as if she could already see the park benches that she planned to place along the woods’ edge. She never actually reached the park bench stage of her planning, but she’d tell me about it as if telling me a grand story.
She loved tending that space. I suspect she was also tending to me.
So many places do not tend well to life. So many social dynamics lean toward polarization and anger. All the more, the places and people who have cared deeply and tended well linger in my imagination. Whatever else the world holds for me, it holds this: a past still simmering under the present, warming with a warmth every bit as real as any cold or harm now. Old acts of care still draw my eyes to fallen trees where a chainsaw artist might have paused. These memories have me driving by my father’s old drug store and smiling as if I were returning his smile even now. I let myself remember, receiving all that care as both benediction and promise.
These days, two little birdfeeders hang on a shepherd’s hook outside my back window. Two feeders do not a bird sanctuary make, but they do keep me in mind of my grandmother’s smile and her dreams. They help me remember what I want never to forget. There are smiles still to smile. There are lives still to tend.
This essay originally appeared in The Polk Street Review 2025, where it was awarded the 2025 Award of Merit (Best in Book) prize.
Callie J. Smith 