Grandma's House

In the beginning there were backyard raspberries. Rows and rows of them, ripening in the morning sun and waiting to be squeezed and plucked by stubby fingers.

“I’m sending the kids over for berries,” Mom would say to her mother on the phone. She’d untangle us from the long and winding phone cord, hand us some bowls, and shoo us out the door, buying herself a few moments of peace.

Our sneakers would slap down the sidewalk to the brown ranch-style house near the corner. We’d burst in the side door under the carport (family never knocked) to find Grandma, short and soft, bustling around her small kitchen, her own twisted phone cord following her as she and Mom gabbed away. As though they hadn’t spoken in weeks.

“Go on back, kids! Take as many as you can pick!” Through the sliding screen door we’d fly, into the sprawling backyard with its flowers, shade trees, and bushes full of tart and fuzzy raspberries. We’d fill our bowls and our mouths—always checking the holes for bugs—and then race back home to Mom, who was still cleaning the kitchen, still talking on the line, still laughing.

Grandma’s house back then meant raspberries and a nonstop stream of words. Words and jigsaw puzzles on card tables at Christmas. Grandma loved to do puzzles but hated to undo them, so when she finished one she’d have Grandpa Wilf glue it together and hang it up. The spare room in her basement was plastered in jigsaw puzzles, pasted edge-to-edge and floor-to-ceiling on every wall. This room was the main attraction for all the cousins during family parties and Sunday visits. We’d pull the old flowered toy chest with the puffy vinyl lid across the gold shag carpet and climb on top for optimal viewing of our favorite puzzle: a Norman Rockwell of a boy in a doctor’s office waiting for a shot, exposing his bare buttocks to the general merriment of all.

Those early days at Grandma’s were also full of Christmas parties. Chip dip and divinity. The unbridled frenzy of Santa visits and terrified babies. Toddlers in shepherd costumes and tinsel halos against a backdrop of gold tasseled drapery framing the large front window. Grandpa smiling as he sat back and took in the commotion. And Grandma in every room, fussing and fixing. Feeding people. Always talking.

That was my beginning. But of course the brown house near the corner was filled with stories long before I entered it. From Grandma’s tellings and retellings and my mom’s stacks of spiral-notebook journals, I’ve cobbled together older memories, so vivid they’re almost mine. My dark-haired, perfectionist mother struggling with geometry at the kitchen table. That same young girl, maybe twisting her hair self-consciously, sitting downstairs on the blue shag carpet with a tall, tentative boy with a cornball sense of humor and a head still full of light brown hair. They while away the hours together, so young and unaware, listening to Bread and Carpenters records. I’ve pictured the scene so many times, it almost feels like I was there.

The Christmas I turned twelve, Grandma and I opened matching build-it-yourself dollhouse kits. The coincidence seemed strange at the time, but a few months later my mom was gone and our dollhouse pieces were spread across Grandma’s kitchen table. Almost every day that summer I escaped the throbbing emptiness of my own house and sat in the breeze of her rotating fans, gluing and painting, measuring tiny carpet samples and pieces of wallpaper, and listening. The cadence of her low voice was the soundtrack of my days. I stored up her stories and pieced together my own history.

When I wasn’t building a miniature maroon colored house, I was tagging along on Grandma’s fabric store errands, popping my Tiffany tape into the cassette player in her car, talking her into letting me get my ears pierced at the mall. Grandma’s root beer–brown eyes were sadder that summer, but still they saw me. And so I kept coming back.

Then later, when I grew and moved away, the spot I had occupied in my family’s full house was quickly swallowed up and I found it hard to squeeze back in. But just down the road, Grandma and Grandpa had space for me. A whole cozy den of a basement! A dark, cool room with blue shag carpet and wood paneled walls and a big, deep bed that pulled me in and held me tight in its cocoon. This was home in my transition times—those strange, still months before my mission; those even stranger months after, before I found an apartment and submerged myself in the next hectic semester. I could sleep unheard-of hours in those days, when the time was mine and it stood still, while the narrow basement windows kept the light of day away.

Of course when I was there I often yearned to be gone. I wasn’t used to such proximity with someone so involved, so all-seeing. I pushed against her questions (“Have you had those moles checked lately? Are you meeting any boys?”) and bristled at her well-worn stories (This one again? I’d think as I inched toward the door). I moved away, to somewhere I could breathe, with roommates I’d go days without seeing. But then came those evenings when my life felt too heavy, my future too hazy, my anonymity surprisingly suffocating. I’d burst through the door unannounced, just in time for dinner, and Grandpa would load me up with steak and potatoes, and Grandma would let me pour all my tears and my worries on her until they lost their potency. I hadn’t known it before, but I was learning now: It’s always better to be seen than not.

Now, Grandma’s house is quieter. All the gold and olive-green accents have been replaced by mauve and country blue. Grandma’s still inclined to bustle and fuss, but she’s trapped there in that chair, in that body. So she bustles on Facebook, at the age of eighty-five, popping in and out of my newsfeed. Marveling at my cousin’s world travels, praising my smallest parenting efforts, liking every photo of her legions of great-grandchildren. When I visit I walk up the ramp to the door under the carport and enter (family never knocks) to find Grandma and Grandpa waiting in their big soft recliners. Grandpa is still quiet and smiling, still happy to see me. Grandma’s hugs are long and strong. Her talk is eager and constant, her stories the same.

I steal a moment alone to go down the stairs and into the still, blue, musty calm of my mother’s old room—my old room. I sink down on the bed and remember when time was so abundant I both slept it away and ached for it to pass. I walk down the hall to the little puzzle room and gasp at the smell of familiarity. The surrounding pictures stare back impassively. That good old bare-cheeked Norman Rockwell kid is still here, pants still dropped, hanging in perpetual suspense but at eye level now. The quiet air in this house swirls so thick with memories it presses against my chest. Even now, when I’m here and she’s here, I’m alive with the awareness that every moment going by is one I’ll soon want back, but I’m helpless to keep it, to hold it.

There’s nothing to do but walk back up the stairs. Straight ahead is the window my older brother threw a rock through decades ago. Down the hall is the sewing room where Grandma helped me make a pink and white drop-waist Easter dress with a big lacy collar. Out the back door is the small grassy hill I used to cartwheel down to the applause of my mom and her sisters. And in the front room the TV is on, the crochet hook is still for now, and Grandma rests in her chair, on oxygen, in pain. But her eyes still see me.

I’ll keep coming back as long as I can.