The Sheets of Pickle Jars and Broken Bicycles

She was never a writer, not that I know. Yet that day, the tons of paper sheets I found in the dusty pantry, hidden between the pickle jars and my broken bicycle, told a different story. The meticulous handwriting was my grandmother’s; the same as the carelessly scribbled addresses, names, and phone numbers I saw in the kitchen every day. I took the first sheet that came to my hand and began to read. 

Şehnaz Özdemir. What an unusual name. The paper said the woman was the manager of the cooperative project for the building we live in now. The cooperative that, just a few months ago, saddled us with a massive debt out of nowhere. Apparently, she was the only daughter of a wealthy urban family, forty-nine years old and unmarried. The page was a first-person narrative; it was the day she came to announce the lawsuit. While my mother and I made coffee in the kitchen, she was left alone with the woman in the living room. Right after some idle chatter, the conversation turned quickly to the woman’s family. 

Although I couldn’t understand the aim of the text, it possessed a language that refused to forget anything about the scene. The sheet ended with the woman leaving us the documents after she finished her coffee.

I wanted to take the papers to my room for a more comfortable read. Besides, in such a cramped pantry, I could have broken a pickle jar at any moment. There were well over a hundred sheets covered in writing. 

There was a familiar name on the next paper, Fatma Yılmaz. She was my high school English teacher a few years ago. The woman who first inspired me to write. Interestingly, she always smelled of vegetables. The paper began with a detailed description of my high school: when it was founded, how many teachers it had, and the year Fatma Yılmaz started working there. These pages were a bit more disorganized; there was even a list of all the English grades I had received from her. Then, there was another first-person account. 

My mother and I were sitting in the kitchen talking, she was listening from the next room. I was talking about my dreams, and she was thinking about how adorable it was. Then came a sentence in quotes, underlined again and again.

“She said think of this as recording what you see. Your own life and the people around you. It’ll help you a lot and when you get used to it…” The rest of it had become illegible. Was she trying to do this all along? A collection of acquaintances and a memory of the known. 

The next one had my mom’s name. But this time, filled with traits listed in the form of a CV. “Weight: 75kg, Height: 162cm, Occupation: Wanted to be a lawyer as a child, Housewife.” It seemed she hadn’t mentioned my father at all. “Goes to bed an hour earlier than usual on Thursdays.” The stains and the shaky handwriting had made it considerably hard to read. Her hands had grown significantly weaker over the last few years. 

However, I learned so many things that I didn’t know about my mother: her favorite haircut, her favorite spot in the city, her habit of secretly kissing her flowers after watering them when no one was around… It made me feel as though I had been watching her for centuries. She concluded her part with a very short paragraph: 

“It tears me apart that a pimply little girl has shouldered all my burdens. I know she doesn’t mind, I carried her, too. But she was much lighter than I am.” 

The sheets scattered over my bed. I put my mother’s sheet aside and lay down. Dozens of people lay there with me, filtered through two brown eyes. The smell of cold and vinegar drifted in from the open pantry door. We were all crammed in next to dozens of pickle jars and my old blue bicycle. I heard the door opening; it was my mother. I ran to her side.

“How is she?” She was holding a bag of cucumbers. Winter preparations. 

“The doctor said she needed to be intubated. There was nothing more they could do.” The same brown eyes were looking at me, brimming with tears. 

And so, another life worthy of recording was slipping away, worlds apart from the sheets.