Memories

There’s something about pulling into the driveway of a place you love. It’s a brief moment of joy, not for what is about to happen, but for what has happened. Memories. The smell of cedar and earth, fish and freshness. And the sounds of crickets and frogs. They aren’t just the memories of things that have happened—it’s so much deeper than that. If I lived a hundred years without this place, I could recognize it in an instant. It is everything that is home. 

It had been an exhilarating drive. Mile after mile over country roads and driving by the light of the stars alone. With the engine of my old red truck in fifth gear and my foot pressed hard on the accelerator, I raced toward that little cottage with the windows down and the distinctive smells of farm and lake and wilderness flooding the cab and calling me back to the place where time stood still.

As I stood in the drive, and as suddenly as a croaking bullfrog pierces the night, a bright light broke the darkness: not a star, not a comet, but perhaps a bit of memory intertwined with the present. Standing in the drive, eyes toward the heavens, I could see a light somewhere in my periphery. Flash. Flash. Flash.

In my mind I could hear the little clicks of the flashlight in those ancient hands, with her costume jewelry rings clinking across the old metal casing. My gram never bought anything new. That old flashlight had probably clicked off and on in her hands for the past fifty years. Steady pulses of light through the dark. 

I could see her white hair in the window, shining brightly with each click of her flashlight, then fading to a blur. She had just been to the beauty parlor. I could pick out Remy’s coif just about as clearly as I could sense I was home. I waved excitedly. She flashed. 

I stepped across the yard, looking for the slate stepping stones my grandfather had laid decades before. They were still there, as steady as everything in places where time seem to tick by slower. I took the three steps to the front stoop in one, and clicked the latch on the door. There was no doorknob; no one had ever thought to install a lock. Instead, just a little latch, like what you might find on a bathroom medicine cabinet. The only intruders in the past ninety years had been the wind on days when the storms came in from the south, and chipmunks when the heavy snows burrowed down the lake from the north. 

I pulled the door open quietly, then walked across the uneven floors and into the kitchen. The cottage smelled of baked bread and casseroles, and wood cleaner and Oil of Olay face cream. “The fancy cream,” she had always called it, as she doled it out in tiny little dollops. Well, back when she could form full sentences, anyways. “We can’t waste it, it’s expensive! Gotta last!” 

My mother always rolled her eyes at this, muttering something about Depression children, but I took my ration with awe, spreading it in small circles on my cheeks the way Gram did. My gram knew about the finer things in life. It didn’t matter to me that she thought expired lotion from the Five and Dime was expensive. 

The calendar on the kitchen wall read “May 2003”, which was only about a decade off, but the walls around me told of a time long before. The old dinnerware stood where it always had—on display—never to be used. The hutch, the chairs—dozens of chairs, though there were very few bottoms to fill them. Baskets hung from the beams on the ceiling: dozens and dozens of woven baskets. 

I rounded the corner to the living room, which flowed just a little downhill from the kitchen. The old cast-iron skillet sat idle on the stove, resting up for the next day. The oven had a clock that had read 4:23 for my entire life. I noticed these things only because someone had once pointed them out to me as something that was wrong about my favorite place. To me, the little world encompassed by these walls was perfection; from the crooked floors to the boards hewn from the timber out back, this was the only place that would ever be home. 

My gram still stood in the window, and her flashlight still trained on me.  Flash. Flash. Flash. My eyes had spots, but I didn’t turn away.

“You!” she said. Flash. Flash. The costume rings clanked against her light. 

Her rosy cheeks beamed and her soft blue eyes shone, even in the dark room. Her lips curled into a smile, her generously applied lipstick almost reaching the dimple on her cheek.   

That one word said so much. You are here! Come sit with me and we can watch our program. Be quiet so your mom doesn’t wake up and spoil our fun! 

“Me,” I said. I had always been her favorite, and she mine. “How are you? And how is ol’ Red?” I asked, pointing at her shirt. She always wore her favorite sweatshirt when she knew I was coming home. An old, stereotypical “grandma” sweatshirt that my grandfather bought her in Myrtle Beach about twenty years before. It was ratty with a big red cardinal on a snowy branch. I bet, in Myrtle Beach, it had been on a super sale. But to my grandmother, it was classy—even with all the tomato soup stains. 

“Fine, fine!” she said, answering for both her and Red. Her light clicked off. “Here!” She pointed to my seat. Evidently, that was enough chit chat for her. When your vocabulary consisted of only about seven words, there was no need to use them all up at once.

My seat was on the old couch, just an arm’s length away from her “new” glider, which had an imprint on its cushion from her sizable backside having planted itself there for the past seventeen years. New.

My seat was the cushion on the couch that was closest, so that if I rested my hand on the armrest, she could rest her hand on mine. And she did, right after she clicked on the TV. Someone had set up her television to play Everybody Loves Raymond on an endless loop. There were probably only three or four episodes that played over and over again. Perhaps the only good thing about losing your mind is that you get to see your favorite TV show for the first time every few hours. 

Each time, she reacted the same. Each time, she giggled like a child. Her favorite character was Robert. She didn’t notice that she and Marie had an uncanny resemblance. Or maybe she did. It’s one of a million things I couldn’t ask her. 

“You!” she said, and smiled. I am so glad you are here. I have so much to tell you.

“Me,” I said. I am so happy to be home.

I watched the old screen, wondering how my grandma’s ninety-year-old eyes could make out the characters, but knowing that they could because she giggled every time Robert came on. 

“Meg,” she said, and my heart jumped, as though struck with electricity. 

“Meg,” she said again, her voice lowered to a whisper. I turned, and a spark shone in her eye. Mischief. I smiled back, just as mischievous. “Meg, did you fix the dent in the car?” Her speech was instantly precise, and her face as expressive as if she were on the screen with Robert. Her head nodded toward the window, where my red truck was barely visible in the drive. My heart skipped. 

The old house creaked. I looked around at the wooden walls, built from lumber cut down just a hundred feet away, almost a hundred years ago. Cut and hewn by hands that she once knew. To me, the house had always been old, broken down. But to her, it was new and fancy. 

I’m not Meg, but I sure knew who Meg was. She died in the 1960s. I blinked at my gram, wondering just what year it was in her mind. It wasn't present day, and it wasn't 2003, despite what the calendar says. I was honored to be Meg. She was my gram’s best childhood friend. 

I leaned in. “Not exactly,” I said. She leaned in too, way out of the glider. I eyed it, wondering if it could handle the shift in weight.

“What, then?”

I had heard enough stories of Meg to know that Meg was not a good driver. No one taught girls to drive in the 1930s. Then a war came, the brothers left, and they just picked up where the men had left off. Whether they could drive or not. 

I wasn’t sure which dent my gram was referring to, there had been so many. So, I improvised. “I parked it so my father couldn’t see it. He’d been drinking all day anyway. He just walked right by, Bea.”

My gram sat straight up. “Right by? Just like that?”

“Just like that.” The canned laughter on the TV caught my attention, but not my gram’s. Wherever in time we were, there were no televisions.

“Well, that was a close one!” My gram relaxed just a bit. But her eyes kept smiling. “Can I show you something?” It was a question, but she was already on her feet. Her short, shuffling steps seemed lighter. She shuffled through the kitchen to the back bedroom.

“Mind the oven,” she said, pointing to the cabinets below the range. “Mother’s got some bread in there. My cousin Jimmy is home on leave and we’re feeding the whole neighborhood this weekend.” 

Home on leave. We’re in the 1940s. 

“Mother’s bringing out the good dishes. The one the Bishop brought from Ireland.” 

The dishes. I had always known there was a story behind those dishes, which had collected dust for at least my entire lifetime. 

“These dishes?” I said, pointing at them. 

“Don’t even look at them, Meg,” she said. “If one of them were to break, my mother would kill me. The Bishop won’t be back for another ten years.”

I smiled. So that was the story with those dishes. “Did they come straight from Ireland?”

“Straight from County Clare.”

I filed that away in my own memory. 

“Mother’s been polishing these floors for a week,” my gram was saying. I glanced at the old, faded linoleum. “She wants them to shine, but pine can’t shine.”

“What?” I said.

“Pine. The floors are pine, not oak. They’ll never shine. Too much pitch still in them.”

I looked to the corner of the cream-colored flooring. A small area was peeling, revealing a dark brown wood. 

“They’re beautiful,” I said. 

Another question burned in my mind. “Where are the baskets from, Gram?” 

“You mean basket? Aunt Hat. You know that! She made that basket and Pa had no idea what to do with it. So he hung it up so she could see it. It’s pretty, but Aunt Hat is…well, you know.”

I did.

“She loves that basket though.”

One basket. 

“She says she’s going to make a whole lot more,” my gram said.

“I believe it,” I said. “Dozens more.”

We walked into the back bedroom—my bedroom. She grabs my hand firmly. It doesn’t feel like an ninety-year old hand. It feels young and strong. Like it must have to Meg all those years ago. The floorboards groan. “Look at the nice carpet! It’s so modern!”

I nod my head in agreement, staring at a threadbare covering across the floor. There’s nothing modern about this house. But I want to see it through her eyes, when it was new. How often does one get to travel in time? 

We tour the “new” bedroom. The one lined with pictures spanning from 1960 to the present. She points out my cousins, telling me that was her mother’s family when her mother was a child. I don’t mention that the family didn’t own a camera in the 1890s. Or that they probably didn’t have a Buick. That’s something my mother would do. 

She reaches into a drawer and pulls out what looks like an old lace doily. “My slip,” she says. “Just look what I’ve done to it.” She shakes the doily. I feign shock.

“Oh Bea!” I say. “How did that happen?”

“I was talking on the telephone with John,” she says, her voice in a whisper. “On a long distance connection. And, I was ironing! And I got distracted and I went and burned it clear through!”

The lace doily was a pristine white, with no sign that it had ever been ironed. 

I thought about what Meg might do. Certainly she wouldn’t chide my gram. Instead, I giggled, and so did she. Not the hoarse giggle of an old lady, but the strong, high pitched giggle of a girl in the prime of her life. It echoed off the walls of the old cottage in a gleeful victory over time and age and memory. I laughed with her, until tears streamed down our cheeks. 

She handed me the doily, and I wiped my eyes, which only sent her into another fit, before she too, took her “slip” back into her hand and wiped her own face. 

But her tears kept falling. “I just have this feeling he’s never coming home,” she said, and used the slip to blow her nose. 

1942. 

I was relieved my mom was already in bed. If she were downstairs, she’d roll her eyes and start to reason with Gram. Well, her version of reason. “Dad’s dead!” she’d say, annoyed. “He’s dead!” And then my Gram would really start to cry. The other adults would say it’s best. They’d try to convince me that we couldn’t live in her pretend world. 

But I knew it was not pretend. It was a real world with real people that happened. And it was just as vivid as any world of the present. I couldn’t imagine the pain of learning that someone you love is dead each and every day of your life.

And so I pretended with her. “Of course he’s coming home, Bea,” I said. “I’m sure of it.” And I was. I knew for a fact that he came home in 1945. And that they got married and had four children. They lived a happy life between these walls, and grew old with the creaking timber. They added more and more baskets to the beams on the ceiling (Aunt Hat lived a long, long time) and filled the home with trinkets and photos. They never, ever used those dishes from the Irish Bishop. 

“I know,” I said. “Let me go and get you some cream from the ice box. We’ll put some crème de menthe on it.” I knew that this was my gram’s favorite. “It’ll make you feel better!”

“And get us in trouble,” she said. “The crème de menthe is for Jimmy’s party.”

“Just a little,” I said.

The mischievous grin came racing back. “Ok. Just don’t get caught.”

My gram didn’t have an ice box anymore. But I knew right where they used to keep it, right next to where the dryer now sat. I knew this because in recent years, before my gram lost her ability to form sentences, she called the dryer the ice box. And we’d both recognize the mistake and giggle. But then she stopped recognizing it was a mistake, and stopped being able to say words like “ice box.” And then she fell almost totally silent, except in the depths of her memory. 

I ran over to the dryer, across the uneven floor, over the linoleum that hid the beautiful old pine floors. I pounded my hand on the dryer, made it sound like I was fooling with the doors to an icebox. Then, I ran to the freezer, grabbed the vanilla ice cream, and poured the crème de menthe over it until the concoction turned a bright green. 

I scurried back to the living room, past the 2003 calendar, and ran smack into my mother. I got caught.

“What’s all this laughing?” she hissed. “You could wake the dead.” I almost told her that we kind of were waking the dead, in Gram's memories at least. But my mother looked angry and tired, so I kept my mouth shut. 

“You’ve upset Gram!” she says. “She was off her rocker, mumbling incoherence. You know better than to get her all worked up!” My heart sank as I glanced over to the white hair rising above the “new” glider, with Everybody loves Raymond blaring. 

I pushed past my mother, ice cream in hand. My gram was staring blankly at the television. I handed her an ice cream. She took it without noticing me. “Here, B—uh Gram,” I said. 

“You!” she said, her eyes still teary. I am so glad you are here.  

“Your favorite dessert,” I said. She didn’t seem to notice her ice cream. I took the remote from her hand, and fast forwarded to Robert. She giggled, and reached for my hand. 

I closed my eyes to stop the tears from falling. I wished I could still be Meg for her, and help her to coax those beautiful memories to the surface of her mind. I breathed in the smell of the old cottage. Outside, the frogs and the crickets called, and I knew that no matter how long I lived, these would be the sounds and smells of my life, living on deep in my memory long after I could give voice to word, “home”. I watched Gram breathe deeply as she slipped into a slumber, and wondered if she smelled the old wooden walls in her dreams, or instead, freshly hewn timber.