the home place

I learned the way to my grandma’s house as a very young child. I knew it was thirteen miles from our house, on country roads, all gravel. I knew the turns and the spreading cottonwood trees in the pasture gullies, the houses we would pass. (There were few enough in those thirteen miles, and now even fewer.) I knew the way I would begin to feel carsick as the land became rougher, and hilly, close to her house.

There was her mailbox, mounted to an old water pump, and the long drive which sloped downhill to the house and always had big ruts where the water ran through. The Scotch pines to the north of the house, which sang in the wind, and the lilac bushes which Grandpa planted not long before he died, at the front of the house. The acrid smell of coffee as you stepped onto the back porch, and the kitchen, which always smelled even stronger of coffee, but also, vaguely, of cookies. Or perhaps of a tin which has had cookies in it, and has sat for a few days, holding crumbs. The smell of sugar, and vanilla.

Of course, there were always cookies. When I was young, there would often be several different kinds. Crispy, melt-in-your mouth sugar cookies, soft chocolate or banana drops, chewy oatmeal raisin, and giant monster cookies, studded with salted peanuts and M&Ms candies. The first thing anyone did at Grandma’s, was to get a cookie. “Get yourself a cookie,” she would say, as you stepped in the door, either because she saw you were headed there anyway, or she couldn’t resist the opportunity to feed her family as much and as often as she could. And we did, pulling open the lids to the tins to see what was there — and then, cookies in hand, we could proceed into the sitting room. “Now come sit down and tell me what’s new with you,” she’d say, as we settled into our seats, she in her favorite rocker-recliner, and you in the rocker across from her.

I don’t think there was any home that ever felt homier to me, than Grandma’s. It had so many problems — sloping floors and hideous wood paneling, a wagon wheel chandelier and dropped ceiling, a crumbling foundation and pipes that always froze in winter. The kitchen was minute, so narrow that two people could only just manage to pass one another in it, providing one of them pressed themselves over the enamel topped tables which served as the countertop. And yet it was everything wonderful and cozy and familiar.

I returned to Grandma’s house almost two weeks ago, now. I had not visited since the day the entire family, all her living children and grandchildren, descended upon her, and forced her to move from the “home place,” as she often called it, to the nursing home. It was a terrible day, one that I hate to think of. She lost her home that day, and we were all part of that happening. I will never forget her face. I was sure we were making a terrible mistake, even though I couldn’t see how she could continue on in her home.

In the end, it happened, even though I think some of us wondered if she would survive the trauma of it. She did. And she has come to accept it, mostly. When I visit with her recently, she talks of living on the farm like it’s many years ago, even though it’s not yet been eighteen months.

I spent a few minutes looking out the east windows of her sitting room, standing where the glider rocker used to sit, where children and granchildren sat to visit with her. I passed dozens of mornings sitting there in the dark with Grandma, she drinking coffee, rocking quietly with a cat on her lap, watching the sunrise. Without her chair and her orange globe lamp and stacks of books and letters and cards, without Grandma — that room doesn’t hold much for me.

a scuffed old metal cabinet with peeling “contact” paper

But the kitchen still seems somehow living. So much happens in a kitchen, that perhaps some of the energy remains forever in the much-used enamel farmhouse sink, or the sky-blue-painted cupboards. I looked in all them, which still smell of metal bakeware, and one of them, of brown sugar and chocolate chips. One cupboard stood open, holding a few pieces of crystal dishware that hadn’t been claimed by any children or grandchildren. I took a small, clear glass whiskey bottle which Grandma often set on the windowsill above her kitchen sink, with a single stem of whatever might have been blooming just then.

I brought it home and put it above my own kitchen sink, which faces west, as hers did and still does. It’s a small thing, but it feels like home to me.

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(Postscript)
This post-it note has been stuck to the cabinet for almost ten years now. Grandma put it there after my Aunt Lesa’s memorial service. She found the photo slide show at the memorial too much to bear - I can imagine now as a mother, how it broke her heart again to watch it — but grandma is such a character. She was constantly making lists for different family members of things she needed, or chores and tasks that needed done, thoughts she had. So she wrote it on a post-it note and — this is my guess, because what post-it note ever could have stuck to a cabinet in a steamy kitchen for ten years? — superglued it to the cabinet for all posterity! I suppose I’ve read it hundreds of times. Look how faded it is. Well, she meant it then, and I know she still means it. And there will NOT be slide show at her memorial!

the garden grown, the garden remembered

There are so many things I wish I’d shared from the garden this summer. In a summer garden, each day is its own painting, the colors and forms shifting as one bloom falls away and a new one takes its place, as new leaves and tendrils emerge overnight.

In early June, my hollyhocks were beautiful, splendid even - I had nearly every color I’ve ever wanted this year - - but the rain that helped them along was ultimately their downfall, too, as they developed such bad fungal rust that I just couldn’t keep them and by July I had torn them all out and replaced them with cosmos which I transplanted from the lower garden. And so the focus shifted from the towering hollyhocks to the more subtle and delicate sweetpeas and morning glories, winding their way up the teepee trellises. By mid summer, the sweetpeas were waning, and the snapdragons and zinnias and four-o-clocks were in their element, taking the heat in stride, and attracting swarms of pollinators and grasshoppers. Nettie spent hours watching striped caterpillars slowly inch along the dill stalks, determined to discover how they made their crysallis.

I take flowers to my grandma in the nursing home every week. The first bouquets of the season were small and humble, flowers that Nettie and I had to scrounge for, and could only fill a spice jar. They grew a little each week, and now, at the height of the zinnias, she receives a very large bunch, mixed with cosmos and snapdragons and great seedheads of fennel and fragrant white phlox.

“I used to raise lots of flowers,” she always says, vaguely. She can’t remember, anymore, exactly which flowers she raised. She often asks the names of each flower I’ve brought. I show her photos of my gardens, which she has never visited. “Ohhh, isn’t that pretty?” she says. She has Nettie get out the envelope of photographs she keeps in her nightstand. In a stack of photos that spans nearly 90 years, are a few over-exposed pictures of one of her gardens, perhaps from the ‘70s or ‘80s. I can recognize zinnias, and marigolds, and if I squint and use my imagination, four-o-clocks.

There is something that I’m trying to say, but can’t articulate, and so I keep hoping that if I bring all the pieces together, I will make the connection. It has to do with the garden, with flowers, with growing and sharing flowers, with the memory of flowers. It has to do with my grandmother. And with my mom, and my daughter. But also with my neighbor down the road, who doesn’t dare step out on her back steps, for fear of falling and having to be moved to a nursing home. She raised flowers, she gave me the German iris which grow along my fence, the same irises I can remember on the altar of my childhood church. I take her flowers every few weeks, and she, too, lightly touches the blooms and asks what some of them are, and I try to tell her in a voice that is loud enough for her to hear. And it has to do with my other grandma who has been gone for almost 15 years, and who I never really knew that well, who used to fuss over a few rose plants which seemed scraggly to me, and who once brought me a single pink rose bloom in a juice glass to the house where I lived as a newlywed, and I didn’t appreciate it at the time. Didn’t understand the joy that bloom had brought her, or that she had wanted to share that joy and beauty with me.

These are the pieces - I can feel what I want to say, what I want to communicate - but I can’t write it. All I can say is that the garden, the flowers, they link us, through time and place. They are part of a collective memory - of color, of scent, of the feel of a petal on our fingertips or pressed to our lips. Like a humming moth that lights and darts from one trumpet of the four-o-clock to the next, showing itself only in motion, in shadow - I can only gesture at what it all means, how it all fits. All I know is that there were flowers once, and I grew them - you grew them - she grew them - we all did, once.

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Postscript

In college, I took a poetry class. It was life-changing, in a way, because it was the first time I thought of myself as creative. It would be several years before I tried any visual art, but writing those poems opened up something for me. I realized I had stories to tell, and I’ve been trying to tell them ever since, though not so often in poetry, these days. This was the first poem I wrote for that class, our assignment was a sonnet. My sonnet is modified, with an added fifteenth line.

Mirabilis

“When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered….. the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls….. bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.” — Marcel Proust

First flower she learns to name, four o’clocks

form the border of her mother’s garden. Strange

blooms stay shut all day, finally unlock

funnel-shaped flowers as sun sinks low, change

erupting with dew in the grass. Sweetness sweeps

deep on cool breeze, flutters curtains, hovers heady,

draws from drowsy dishes hushed house half-asleep

mother and child, chattering into the blue night, giddy

trips to the garden where humming moths sink,

spin in nectar-kissed kinesis between rows.

Four o’clocks ogle the moon, gold and pink

blossoms-turned-blue that the child plucks, twirls, throws

away, silk corpses crushed underfoot. Spent

petals, perfume linger when they wake, glint

like memory of dreams, lost at the moment

of waking.