This is the question I have to answer before the weekend is over. My grandfather passed away last month, (my grandmother a few years ago) and they are getting the house ready to sell. We have been asked to make a list of “personal” items we might like to keep in our own homes now.
That house was the only constant thing in my life growing up. The place that was always there, no matter how many times we moved, changed schools, whatever. I remember every inch of it, the smell of it, the rooms, the yard. I knew the neighbors better than I knew our own neighbors.
Can I have the feeling of sitting on those tv room steps, watching Batman with my cousins and eating Grandpa’s freshly popped popcorn? One last batch of his delicious baguettes, fresh out of the oven with butter and jam?
Maybe I could have a summer day picking snapdragons and making dolls out of them with my grandmother? Climbing around in her rock garden? Perhaps canning apricots and strawberry jam with her?
How about that delicious, spine tingling fear heading into the basement to get something from the food pantry to help with baking? Past the darkened storage room, the window wells where spiders might lurk, and into the orderly room full of canned goods and chest freezers to find what Grandma had sent me for, and then back upstairs before some evil basement monster got me?
Maybe just sitting on grandma’s bed one more time, watching her get ready to go somewhere, smelling the lotions and perfumes she always used, and sifting through her button jar (to keep me out of everything else in the room, probably.)
Could we all pile into the dune buggy my uncles built and head out for a drive, maybe to the lake to feed the ducks? Or hop in the LTD and drive down to Midway, where we always got those soft serve ice cream cones with the plastic swords or animals stuck in them. What were they thinking back then, anyway?
But then I grew up, and religion separated us. The first granddaughter (second grandchild), first child of their oldest daughter, the first to make a conscious decision not to participate in their religion anymore. I also lived in sin with, then married, then divorced, some idiot when I was in my early twenties. Our relationship became distant and uncomfortable. My mother’s death in 1997 removed the “buffer zone” and our contact became even more infrequent.
Now it has been close to twenty years since I even visited the house. I still see it in my dreams, any dream of significance I have usually takes place there (at least until it gets really surreal…but anyway).
So is there some thing that will help it be all better? Are any of the little objects I remember even still there? Do I deserve any claim on the tiniest thing, being the estranged granddaughter? I don’t know.
Special things she let me play with, like the button jar, the nesting dolls, the puzzle boxes – there are dozens of us with the same memories, right? The carved wooden spoons hanging on the walls, clocks, christmas decorations, I can see them clearly in my mind, is that enough? Would they be any more significant than any simple, well used kitchen or sewing tool? Maybe even less?
I’d like to be in touch with my family again. That’s what I’d like. To be accepted as my atheist, imperfect, crazy self. We were a close family when I was young. I miss them.
Tags: grandparents, mom, death, memories, family
