OUR MOTHER-DAUGHTER TRIP TO THE FARMERS MARKET STARTED LIKE ANY OTHER – UNTIL SHE ASKED ME ABOUT THE WOMAN IN THE PHOTO
It was supposed to be a slow Sunday morning. Just me, my girl, a couple of coffees from the corner stand, and a farmers market we’d been going to since she was small enough to ride in the cart.
She picked out her first bunch of sunflowers all by herself – well, almost. I helped her count the change, but she insisted on handing it over like she’d done it a hundred times. Proud. Brave. The kind of joy you don’t bottle, just try to burn into your brain.
I was taking pictures like crazy. Laughing. Telling her how my mom used to bring me here when I was about her size, how we’d always end up with more tomatoes than we could eat. That’s when she pointed to the old canvas tote I’d dug out from the back of the closet and asked:
“Mama… who’s this?”
She was
What Was Tucked Into the Lining
She was holding a photograph.
Not her phone. Not a printout. An actual photograph, the kind with the white border and the glossy finish that catches light wrong. She’d found the inside pocket I’d forgotten the tote even had, the narrow one with the little snap button, and she’d worked it open the way seven-year-olds work open everything they’re not supposed to.
The picture was small. Maybe three inches by four.
I hadn’t seen it in at least six years.
The woman in it was young. Mid-twenties, probably. Dark hair cut short on one side, longer on the other, the way people wore it around 2003 or 2004. She was laughing at something off-camera, head tilted back, one hand raised like she was about to make a point or catch something. She was wearing a yellow shirt I could still feel the fabric of if I thought about it hard enough. Soft. Worn. Smelled like her.
My daughter was looking up at me with the photograph pinched between two fingers, sunflowers tucked under her other arm, waiting.
I said, “That’s your Aunt Debbie.”
She looked back at the photo. Then up at me. “I have an Aunt Debbie?”
And there it was. The thing I’d been carrying around in a bag I hadn’t opened in six years, in a pocket I’d forgotten, in a corner of my closet behind the winter coats.
“You did,” I said.
The Tote Bag and Where It Came From
I bought that tote at a craft fair in 2007. Debbie was with me. She picked it out, actually. Made me buy it because she said the canvas was thick enough to last twenty years and I was always destroying my bags and this one would outlast me.
She was right about that.
Debbie was my younger sister by three years. She was the kind of person who remembered the name of your dentist and your favorite gas station snack and the exact thing you said at Thanksgiving four years ago that you’d completely forgotten. She kept track of people. She made people feel kept track of.
We weren’t close the way some sisters are. We went through a stretch in our mid-twenties where we barely talked. Stupid stuff. A fight that started over something small and then sat there getting heavier because neither of us knew how to put it down. I moved across the state. She stayed near home. We texted on birthdays. Sometimes.
Then our dad got sick in 2011, and we spent three months driving to the same hospital on the same days and eating vending machine sandwiches in the same waiting room, and somewhere in there the thing between us just dissolved. We didn’t talk about it. We just stopped carrying it.
For about two years after that, we were good. Better than good. She’d come visit and sleep on my couch and we’d stay up too late watching bad TV and she’d steal all my good coffee and not apologize for it.
She was here when I brought my daughter home from the hospital. She cried more than I did. She held her for forty-five minutes and wouldn’t give her back and I didn’t ask her to.
The Part I Don’t Tell Often
Debbie died in January of 2016.
Forty-one days after my daughter turned one.
It was her heart. Something she’d had since she was born that nobody caught until it was too late to do anything about it except be grateful it hadn’t happened sooner. That’s what the doctor said. Grateful it hadn’t happened sooner. I’ve turned that sentence over in my hands a hundred times since then and I still don’t know what to do with it.
She was thirty-four.
I didn’t bring my daughter to the market for almost a year after that. I couldn’t. The market was my mom’s thing and my thing and then Debbie’s thing and mine, and I couldn’t figure out how to be there without the whole chain of it feeling broken.
The tote went in the closet.
I don’t remember putting the photograph in it. I must have, sometime before she died, or maybe after, in that blurry period where I was putting things in places and then forgetting where I put them. The photo was from my cousin’s birthday party, summer of 2004. Someone else took it. I’d printed it out at a drugstore photo counter and stuck it somewhere safe.
Safe turned out to be the inside pocket of a canvas tote behind my winter coats.
What My Daughter Said Next
We stood there in the middle of the market, between the sunflower stand and a table selling honey in small jars, and I told her about Debbie.
Not everything. She’s seven. But the real stuff.
I told her Debbie was funny. That she laughed loud and didn’t care who heard. That she could eat an entire bag of kettle corn by herself and consider it a personality trait. That she loved dogs and bad weather and road trips and the specific kind of quiet that happens right after it stops raining.
I told her Debbie was the first person to hold her.
My daughter looked at the photograph again. Really looked at it, the way kids look at things when they’re actually taking them in and not just glancing.
“She looks like you,” she said.
I don’t know that she does. People used to say that. I never saw it. But hearing it from my kid, standing there with a coffee going cold in my hand and sunflowers going warm in hers, I didn’t argue.
“Maybe a little,” I said.
“Can I keep it?”
My chest did something. I don’t have a word for what it did.
I said yes. Obviously. I said yes before she finished asking.
She held it carefully the rest of the morning. Slipped it into her own little crossbody bag, the pink one with the broken zipper she refuses to replace, and patted the outside of it twice like she was checking it was still there.
The Rest of the Morning
We bought the sunflowers. We bought tomatoes, more than we needed, because that’s what you do. We got a second coffee from the corner stand and she got a lemonade and we sat on the low stone wall by the parking lot and just sat there for a while.
She asked me if Grandma knew Debbie.
I said yes, that was Grandma’s daughter.
She got very quiet processing that. Then she said, “Does Grandma miss her?”
I said yes.
She nodded like that made sense to her in a way she didn’t need to explain.
We talked about other things after that. She told me about something that happened at school I’d already heard twice. I let her tell it again. The market filled up around us, louder, more strollers, a dog barking somewhere near the bread table.
Normal Sunday.
The Drive Home
On the way back, she had the sunflowers across her lap and she was looking out the window and she said, out of nowhere:
“I think she would’ve liked me.”
I kept my eyes on the road.
“I know she would’ve,” I said.
“Because I’m funny?”
“Because you’re you.”
She seemed satisfied with that. She went back to looking out the window.
I drove.
The tote was in the backseat. It’ll probably go back in the closet. But I’ll remember what’s in the pocket now. I won’t forget again.
My mom used to bring me to that market when I was small. I brought Debbie when we were older. Now I bring my daughter. She’ll probably bring someone there someday, and I won’t be there to see it, and that used to be a sad thought. Sitting in the car with the sunflowers and the photograph in the pink bag with the broken zipper, it felt less like loss and more like something being passed forward.
Not fixed. Not resolved. Just still going.
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If this brought someone to mind, send it to them. Sometimes a story does the saying for you.
For more family drama and unexpected twists, read about my daughter’s mysterious morning routine or the time my grandpa tried to get rid of me for a family reunion. You won’t believe what happened when my ex-husband called from a cruise ship screaming about hidden money.
