Little Black Book

I was tucked in a corner of my attic, enjoying myself. I’d found a box of my mom’s, filled with notebooks of every shape, size and color. The one with flowers had recipes, like the one for my grandmother’s tamales. The yellow one, poems; the green one was one of six journals. Some had short stories, including my mom’s favorite genre; mysteries.

At the bottom of the box, I found a little black book, unusual because it was so plain and blank. My mother was forever scribbling stuff down, filling book after book using a variety of colorful pens. Why would she keep a blank book?

I checked the time and realized I’d spent way too much time up here. I got up, patted off the dust from my clothes and headed back down the stairs. As I walked through the house, I ignored all the things that needed fixing. The list had gotten long, but Mark and I just couldn’t afford anything right now. So, we fixed things as best we could and hoped for better days ahead.

I have dark hair and eyes like my mom. Mark says it’s what first drew him to me. But he said it was my sense of humor that had sealed the deal all those years ago. We had worked hard to make a good life together, but times were tight. We were united in our efforts to turn things around.

The next day I headed out bright and early to my bookkeeping job. All those calculations should have kept my mind busy. However, over the next few days, my mind kept thinking about all the stuff I’d read in Mom’s books. I kept coming back to the mystery of the little black book. Somehow, I knew it meant something.

It suddenly came to me when I was ironing. “Invisible ink!” my brain shouted. I ran back to the attic and grabbed the little black book. When I was small, my mom had taught me to write with lemon juice, which disappeared as it dried. I took the first page and pressed the iron against it. Suddenly, brown writing appeared, just like mom had showed me so long ago.

I ironed page after page and more words appeared, just one on each sheet, likely made with a small paint brush. Finally, everything was revealed. It was one of her poems:

“My feet roam across sweet dreams,

Walking from the weeping lady toward the rock jump,

My steps measured by the ladder’s span,

Digging deep for earth’s riches.”

My father had always hated Mom’s poems because they didn’t rhyme. What did her words mean and why had Mom chosen to put them in invisible ink? I couldn’t figure it out. I decided to take a walk in the backyard to clear out the cobwebs.

My family had lived in this house in California’s Mother Lode area for generations. My great, great, great grandfather had come here seeking gold, and it was a family legend how he had paid for the land and house with what he’d found.

My mother loved the stories about him and her family and took them to heart. Unlike my grandparents, her marriage had gone south soon after she took her vows. She was determined to make it work despite Dad’s constant drinking and cheating.

When she wanted to get away for a few hours, she took her ragged gold mining gear and headed to the spot rumored to be where her beloved ancestor had found his wealth. She toiled away with a pickax and a small shovel. She dreamed of hitting it big. She was a practical woman and wanted that money to help her family.

One day, when we were sitting on the back porch, she shyly admitted that she did have one fanciful dream. She wanted to fly away and roam the warm, golden shores of Hawaii. She longed to see the palm trees bend as the trade winds tickled her skin.

She’d once told my father about her dream, hoping that he, too, would want to join her in a tropical setting and maybe they could somehow rediscover what they’d lost. He only muttered that if she found gold, he’d use it to buy more whiskey. After that, he constantly mocked her dream and my mom had retreated into herself, only getting a respite with her infrequent gold panning.

I became sad thinking about it. I had to remind myself of the good times. The times Mom and I would play in the yard, running around with our dogs, Sassy and Jump. Or the times she’d read to me before I went to sleep, breathing in the sweet lavender that always scented her skin.

As I washed the dishes, I wondered why she’d chosen that poem to hide away in the pages of her little black book. My gaze wandered across the yard to the willow we had sat beneath on warm summer days. My mom had told me the willow reminded her of a woman, its boughs dancing in the wind.

My mind jolted – weeping willow, weeping lady! Is that what Mom was writing about? What if she’d hidden that poem because it contained a set of clues? But what kind of clues? Clues to what?

I grabbed the little black book and reread the poem. Rock jump? What was a rock jump?

The ladder reference made me think of the old ladder hidden away in the shed. It had once been used to harvest fruit in our small orchard. When it had gotten so banged up and broken that it could no longer be used, she refused to throw it away. It reminded her of fun times picking fruit with her family when she was young. As a result, I, too, let it remain hidden in a dusty corner.

I reread the poem. “Digging deep for earth’s riches” made me think of Mom’s gold mining. Could this little black book be a treasure map? Mom did love mysteries. I went to the old shed and hauled the dirty ladder from its corner. I placed it against the willow tree and gingerly climbed, hoping it didn’t fall apart while I searched the area for clues. There were the flower beds I tended alongside the graves of family pets. Mom and I had adored our pet dogs and she insisted on marking their resting places with small boulders.

“Jump!” I looked at the boulder marking Jump’s grave. “Rock Jump!” I thought. Back to the poem I went.

It mentioned feet and walking. I eagerly placed the base of the ladder against the weeping willow and pointed it toward Jump’s grave. I marked where the top of the ladder rested. If this is a treasure map, could something be buried in this spot? I ran to get a shovel.

Before I could reach the shed, Mark walked outside to see what I was up to. He had just come home, tired from a long day’s work. He saw the ladder with the little black book next to it. He smiled. “So, did you figure it out?”

“It’s a treasure map! Help me get a shovel!” Most husbands would have rolled their eyes, but Mark enjoyed my flights of fancy, even when they came to nothing. He said they kept life interesting.

Without hesitation, he followed me to the shed. We took turns digging in the spot I’d marked, forgetting about our plans to cook dinner. We kept on working after the sun set and we had to turn on the backyard lights.

“I think I’ve hit something!” Mark shouted.

He gently excavated a hard lump of something. I knocked off the dirt to reveal an old metal box my mother used to keep. “This is it! That’s Mom’s!” I cried.

Mark got out his pocketknife to pry open the lid. Inside was something wrapped in aluminum foil. I gently pulled back the foil to reveal small plastic bags.

Inside the bags were gold nuggets.

“Mom’s gold! She found gold after all!”

Mark was examining all the bags of small nuggets. “There’s a lot of gold here. She must have been saving this for decades.”

Mark got a bucket and we moved the bags into it and carried them inside. We put the old metal box and the shovel by the back steps.

We were both silent as we washed up.

“How much do you think it’s worth?” I asked, wiping an old, white towel over my hands.

“You grab that scale you use to weigh food and I’ll get on the internet,” he said.

I weighed a bowl and then carefully moved the contents of the bags into it, making sure to catch every speck of gold.

“It weighs 11.3 ounces.”

Mark used the calculator on his phone. “That’s worth $20,000!”

The enormity of our gain suddenly hit us, and we hugged each other hard.

“We can finally fix up this house the way Soledad would have wanted it done,” Mark said, referring to Mom, whom he had adored. They would often sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking about their dreams for this old house.

“We can do all that and more!” I exclaimed.

Six months later, Mark and I walked down the golden sands of Waimea Bay, on the northern coast of Oahu, enjoying the feel of the trade winds on our skin. It had been a long time since we’d had a break from the daily grind. We had always enjoyed each other’s company and now we had a chance to really connect. That night, we raised our tropical drinks in the moonlight, “To Mom and her dreams,” I said.