Picking Grammy Smith

“Don’t forget about the Amish buggies.”

“Mom, I moved to Harrisburg ten years ago. That’s not long enough to forget about Amish buggies.”

“All right. Love you. Give me a call when you get through the Narrows.”

“We love you, too. See you at the orchard!”

I ended the call and slipped the phone back into my jacket pocket. We were twenty minutes outside of home, which meant that I-81 had given way to U.S. Route 322. The trip would wend along the paths of the Susquehanna and Juniata Rivers, and except for the cluster of truck stops and strip clubs that was Clark’s Ferry, we would see nothing but trees and farmers’ fields until we reached our destination. That’s all it takes to leave the city in Pennsylvania. Twenty minutes in any direction and rural alchemy transmogrifies the people into cows.

Sherry drove. She usually did on longer trips because she was willing to put on another five miles per hour beyond what I would. We flew west under her command, and every grotto able to hide a chase car that would have given me a speeding ticket turned up empty.

“Mommy, are you speeding?” Annie asked from the back seat.

“Just a little,” Sherry lied.

Our four-year-old responded to the news with an exaggerated groan. Her car seat was buckled behind the passenger side, but I didn’t need to see her to know that her arms had swung out in wide pinwheels, fingers splayed. Her eyes rolled. She was prouder of learning to roll her eyes than she was of potty training.

Sherry and I laughed. A sharp turn brought us closer to the river, which we would follow for another half mile before crossing the bridge into Clark’s Ferry. Looking for conversation fodder, I scrolled through Facebook.

“People in Wichita Falls found a time capsule that had been buried for a hundred years,” I said after a few seconds. “They’re opening it today.”

“They should have waited a little longer,” Sherry said. She shook her head in disapproval. “Who knows what will pop out of a box this year? Murder hornets? It could be a beacon to call the aliens and the predators.”

“At least that’s halfway across the country,” I said, scrolling to the next article. “We’ll have time to pack and run.”

“Mommy, what’s a pretador?”

“It’s something from a movie,” I said.

“Is it a scary movie?”

“It’s a grown-up movie.”

“Did you bring the masks?” Sherry asked. It’s easy to change the subject with a four-year-old. Just say something new, and their interest is sparked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I brought an extra for each of us.”

Annie exhaled a dramatic sigh of relief.

It was our first trip since the pandemic put us all in quarantine, and we were all nervous. New cases were back to the level they had been when the state shut down back in April, but this time the state was taking a different approach—pretending that the virus had been a bad dream.

It didn’t put us at ease that we were driving into a region where the apples weren’t the only thing red. Here the MAGA hats were first generation, and the yard signs had arrived five years ago and found no reason to go elsewhere. Here, masks were not just optional. Masks made you a target.

But Mom ran the gamut of risk factors, and we had no intention of mixing a virus into the apples she would pick. She had waited all year to see her granddaughter. Today needed to be perfect.

“Oh, I missed the strip club signs,” I groaned.

Sherry frowned. We were long past the point of her pretending to be surprised and slapping me playfully. My joke didn’t even merit a pity chuckle. I watched our speed creep up a little more.

I realized that Annie had missed her cue to ask an uncomfortable question along the lines of, “What’s a strip club?”

Thinking the same, Sherry glanced into the rearview and said, quietly, “She’s asleep.”

I called Mom when we reached the long-ago widened stretch of road that would always be called the Narrows. Shortly after the call ended, we pulled off U.S. Route 322 onto Route 655. We left Belleville and Reedsville behind; we weren’t going to any such one-stoplight metropolises. Ahead lay real country, where the addresses had begun with R.D. for “Rural Delivery,” until the state named all the country roads in the mid-90s. Here, the people who frequented strip clubs in Clark’s Ferry picketed the only adult book store to dare open its doors within the county lines.

Back in the place of my birth, I judged distance by fields. The mile markers became signs with Bible verses. And not the likes of, For God so loved the world. Where I grew up, the signs read THE WRATH OF GOD COMES UPON THE SONS OF DISOBEDIENCE -Ephesians 5:6, and most farm houses had either one or three crosses in the yard.

As the Ephesians fell behind, I said, “We’ll be there in about five minutes.”

Sherry nodded and glanced again in the rearview. “She’ll be happy if she wakes up and Grandma is outside her window.”

That put a smile on my face.

I checked the clock four minutes later when the Bechtal’s Apple Orchard sign came into view. Next to the painted name was a picture of a colossal red apple. Around its base, little blond-haired boys with cartoon smiles ran with bushels of more reasonably sized apples. Sherry braked evenly and guided the car onto the dirt road down to the combination orchard and shop.

“There’s her car,” Sherry said.

I counted only a half-dozen others in the dirt lot. Relieved, I said, “They’re not busy.”

“We’ll be outside the whole time,” she said. “And no one has left the house in two weeks.”

We were both lucky enough to have jobs that let us work from home and flex our schedules. And to have bosses who accepted that--under these conditions--a small child might be seen running across camera in the background. The risks were minimal, but it was Mom’s life in the balance.

“Breathe,” Sherry said. “Here she comes.”

We rolled down the window. The cool autumn air brought Annie around. She opened her eyes a little. Then she squealed as she recognized Mom looking down on her.

“Unbuckle me, Gramma!”

Mom opened the door and started on the buckles that had kept Annie safe through the last ninety minutes. Her fingers weren’t as spry as they had been, and Annie urged her to move faster.

“Are you ready to pick some apples?” I asked to distract Annie from the ongoing work around her.

“They might have Gala!” Sherry added.

“Gramma! Gramma! Gramma!” Annie replied, climbing out of her seat and into Mom’s arms. Her screams echoed back from the sides of the dell where the orchard stood. Mom smiled, using one hand to wipe away tears behind Annie’s back.

“I missed you!” Mom said, eliciting another round of “Gramma! Gramma! Gramma!” and we all laughed.

Then, suddenly, Annie sobered. She looked Mom directly in the eye and said, “Great Gramma died.”

It was the sort of thing little kids—or at least my little Annie—say. Free association without regard for the emotions it might engender. Mom recovered well. She nodded one time and held Annie’s gaze. “Yes, she did. She’s in Heaven now.”

“What’s Heaven?”

“Heaven’s with Jesus,” Mom said.

“Do they have green apples there?” Annie asked.

“Those are Granny Smith,” Sherry said.

Annie laughed again. “Grammy Smith! Gramma! Gramma! Gramma!”

She swung with each repetition, a top-heavy pendulum. Mom bent and flexed with her, laughing to conceal her fear of letting go.

We all laughed, relieved the storm had passed.

A teenager sat in a wooden kiosk at the entrance. A blue sign with red lettering and white stars declared the name of the orchard’s chosen political candidate. We might have been at the entrance to a drive-in theater, except here you paid when you left. On the way in, the teenager’s sole responsibility was to point out stacks of maps and piles of wooden baskets ringed with iron.

There was no glass in the tall window where the teenager sat. I glanced at Mom, saw that she had kept her distance out of newfound habit, forced myself to breathe. We were all different people ten months into this damned year; some angrier, some more fearful, few of us wiser.

“Is there anything you want to pick?” Sherry asked Mom. She unfolded a map before her.

Mom shook her head as if she had never considered this.

“Let me see!” Annie said, eagerly pulling the map to her level.

“What kind of apples do you want to pick?” Sherry asked.

“Grammy Smith!” she said, giggling.

I leaned closer to Mom. “She’s so happy.”

“Me, too!” Mom said. I thought she was going to give me a hug, but she didn’t. She kept her distance, maybe even leaned a little farther away.

We walked the orchard. Sherry had the map, and we quested for Grammy Smith. The only Grammy we would find that day was Annie’s own, but that was okay. We counted the colors of leaves we found on the ground, breathed in their scents and those of the fallen apples. There were swaths of pumpkins this time of year, but there were still some apples hanging on. We plucked what we found. It hadn’t been apples that brought us here, but we did our due diligence.

We had planned for the afternoon to end with hot dogs and everyone’s choice of apple or pumpkin pie. Another wooden structure functioned as concessions, with picnic tables arrayed nearby. Again, the image of the Juniata County Drive-In came to mind. We lined up behind another family we had spotted several times across the orchard. Out of habit, Mom slipped ahead of me. She liked to silently preempt my efforts to pay for her meal.

“I can’t believe I grew up within fifteen minutes of this place and we never came here,” I said.

“We didn’t?” Mom asked.

I shrugged. She had spots in her memory from when she had been sick. That had been a long time ago, but she was still on immune suppressants for the transplant, and the memories of those years had never returned. We all quietly understood that was for the better. It was hard for the rest of us to be able to remember those days from the outside. Her forgetting them was a blessing.

“Maybe we did,” I said. It was my usual response in moments like these. Digging deeper led into too much painful territory, and I had no intention of sacrificing a day like this over some foolhardy trip into the past.

“What can I get you?” asked a voice from the concessions window.

Mom turned. Then abruptly she was stumbling into me. I half caught her and half stumbled back with her. Surprise shone in her eyes, that and a little fear. She stared up at the man in the concessions window. There was no glass between them, and the thirty-something fellow leaning through the opening wore no mask. With her attention on me while we were talking, Mom had come close enough to kiss him.

He hovered there, patiently waiting. He seemed quietly amused. Thank God he didn’t trot out a modern-day aphorism like, You can’t live your life in fear.

“We can go somewhere else,” I told her. I didn’t bother to lower my voice. “Dairy Queen is open. They have picnic tables.”

Mom spotted Annie watching her with the wide-eyed stare reserved for four-year-olds gazing upon their heroes.

That fast, Mom’s smile returned. “No. I want a hot dog.”

Annie clapped her hands and bounced on her toes. Four-year-olds actually do that. I never believed it till I saw it firsthand.

I stepped forward, ordered hot dogs and pies for everyone. The man in the window didn't balk at taking my money, and Mom didn’t argue when I asked whether I could pick up the tab. She still looked a little nervous as we found a picnic table, but distance helped her put the surprise encounter out of her mind. When I got up to get mustard, she asked me to put some on hers, too.

We started to eat, and before long Annie had her grandmother laughing again. Like Annie, Mom ate most of her hot dog.

“I don’t like cider,” Annie said halfway through the meal.

“They had juice boxes,” Sherry told her, holding out one with dancing mixed fruit on the package.

Annie cheered and asked Mom to open the wrapping on her straw. Proudly, Annie watched her Grandma open the plastic. She held the juice box like a trophy, and then she went to work emptying it in a long series of pulls accompanied by the pleasant static of fruit juice worked through a bendy straw.

I happened to spot Mom as she glanced away, apparently to study the beauty of the hillside in the afternoon sunlight. A moment later she swiped her cheeks again. I made sure I wasn’t looking when her attention returned to the rest of us.

What felt like seconds later, standing between our parked cars, Mom said, “I wish we could do this again.”

“Me, too,” I said. “We’ll have to find a way.”

None of us dared mention Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. It would be the first without her own mom, and with the onset of autumn temperatures the virus had picked up speed around the country, around the northern hemisphere. One would bring mention of the other, and none of us wanted to punctuate the day with something that depressing.

“Come here,” Mom said without warning. She lunged forward and wrapped her arms around me. She whispered as her thin arms endeavored to crush me. “I’m not letting you go without a hug.”

“Love you, Mom,” I whispered.

She hugged Sherry next. Then she scooped up Annie and gave her extra hugs. She smiled happily as she received kisses from the cherub in her arms. Mom wouldn’t sleep well for the next two weeks—till she got through any possible incubation period—but she wouldn’t have slept for months if she had let this opportunity pass her by. 

“Love you guys,” she said. Her eyes were red. I knew mine were, too.

“Bye, Grammy Smith!” Annie said and giggled.

We all laughed one more time. Then we were back in the car, driving into the early autumn twilight. There would be no getting home before dark.