Blue Eyes

Sounds invoke as vivid a memory as smells. Pulling put at four a.m., lying in my makeshift bed in the back seat, the sound of only our car on the road, listening to the transmission changing gears. The smell of hot glazed doughnuts bought in the next town over. The startling aroma of the paper mill two hours into the trip. There is a certain sound a car makes when it leaves the asphalt and continues it's journey on a gravel road. The shaking as the car traverses the ridges in the road from rain runoff. Then the quiet swoosh as it turns onto the sandy road leading to my Grandfather's house. Countless numbers of times I had made that ride with my mom as a child. Watching for the tires cut in half and painted white, the red dirt road that would transport me to a whole different world. In that world I was a city slicker. I remember when it took four hours to make the two hundred mile trip. Four hard hours. Two lane roads the whole way, and passing other cars was just a way of life. There was even a certain jargon. When you pulled out to go around another car you "hit passin' gear". Sometimes we just would "get back in" before dying in a head-on craah. Everyone knew not to "pass on a yellow line" and especially not on a double yellow line.

The road was so narrow, and not as long as I once thought. How did we get that horse up to a full gallop before pulling back the reins? The front yard was not nearly as big as I remembered, but the fence was still good. What's that about fences and neighbors? Then he came out the front door, looking just as he had my whole life. Denim overalls, plaid flannel shirt, and work boots. His greying hair combed back, wondering who in the world had come to visit. My Grandfather.

The salt on my lips. That is the first thing I remember when I think of my Grandfather now. In my mind he is always much younger, with a twinkle in his eye and an amused smile, as he rolls his Prince Albert cigarettes and sips his coffee from a saucer. Watching the kids, and kids, and more kids! Oh, and a hound dog and a chicken or two.

My childhood, and now my adult life, was shaped by that house just as surely as my three bicycles caused permanent callouses, if ever so slight.

The front porch was the gathering place where coffee was drank and gossip was shared. There were green beans to snap, peas and butterbeans to shell, and ears of corn to shuckand silk. In the summertime, a pickup truck piled high up plywood sides with watermelons was the blessed assurance that all was right with the world.

As I crossed the threshold into the front room, I saw the metal pail suspended from the ceiling, holding lighter knots. The fireplace, with a mantle that once seemed so high, was not much more than a hole in the wall. How did we get so many people in the house and bedded down at night? Two rollaway beds, children sleeping crossways on the beds, an uncle and a cousin on a pallet under the table. And if you weren't there at bedtime you would have to sleep in your car.

That was the last time I saw "the old place". My ancestral home, where my grandparents raised twelve of fourteen children. Where my mom grew up, and I spent weeks in the summer, and Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Two small bedrooms, one had two double beds with only a narrow passage in between. The front room had the fireplace, and another double bed. A naughahyde couch occupied the other wall. The second bedroom rotated between "the girls" or "the boys" room. The back door was locked by dropping a spoon handle through the latch.

There was no insulation, nor screens on the windows. I saw a picture once, of my Grandmother in a boat, as a teenaged mom, by the house, during a flood. The house needed painting then, it needed painting when I was growing up, and it never got painted. I remember the taste of the well water kept in a bucket by the back door, with a dipper for drinking. The taste of pennies.

Distant memories of a black, pot bellied stove in the kitchen stir the smell of burning wood in the recesses of my mind. Fresh dripped coffee being "saucered" to me as I sat in my Grandfather's lap. He called us all "John".

But the house that day, was ramshackled, and small. So very small. The front porch; how in the world did it hold two deep freezers and a pascal of kids! An oak tree had fallen on one bedroom, so my Grandfather moved to another room to sleep.

He still had the piercing blue eyes, still had the twinkle, and still was just as proud of his grey donkey as he had been of Kate. Kate was the mule that faithfully plowed the fields for my Grandpa for thirty years.

My Grandfather had lived there alone for seven years when I stopped by that day. It was 1978. I will always hold the memories of my grandparents farm, and my family and the smells, and the sounds, of a different way of life, in a place I can't explain. And the salt. The salt on my lips after I kissed him.

Not long afterwards he went to live in a nursing home. He kept his wits, and his beautiful, piercing blue eyes all the way to the end. He was good at bingo and loved bananas and Juicy Fruit gum. And I carry a part of him and "the old place" with me as I pick ripe tomatoes in my garden or watch the leaves of a tree turn up with the breeze of the dog days of summer.