As you read this, Grandme is a memory, relationships have come and gone, children have left home.
As you read this, only the feeling that existed in this time and place lives on, but it is proof that what people most remember about us is not what we did or said, but how we made them feel.
Walnut leaves fall like golden rain this long-ago autumn as we make the 7 ½ hour drive to the southern mill town of Asheboro, North Carolina, to visit the children’s great-grandmother. We go to escape our daily schedules, to be spoiled with attention and shown off to neighbors, for in this world we are still children, though we have children of our own. We have been coming since we were in college, before we had made a family. Now, we make this trip on borrowed time. Grandme will be 88 in the spring.
When we turn down the long, hilly road leading to Grandme’s brick house, it beckons from the top of the rise like a lantern in the twilight. Autumn is as gentle here as the retired millworkers and Sunday School teachers who reside in this tight-knit community. Even in the balmy November dusk, we can see blue morning glories, tightly closed, clinging to the lamppost as we pull the car into the drive and emerge stiff with travel. Pale yellow roses placed about the house in honor of our arrival greet us in the parlor. A single perfect bud bows from a slender vase on the linoleum kitchen table, where we gather to recount tales of the trip south while the children scamper about in search of “Boy.”
Boy is Grandme’s 17-year-old, black-as-carbon, cat. His formal name is Booger-Boy… a fact we conceal from the children because they would love it too much. No one knows why Boy is peculiar, but his intense paranoia is generally accepted as the infirmity of any aging relative. He jumps at the slightest sound, won’t be held, and spends an inordinate amount of time hiding in the basement, coming and going unobtrusively by a cat door.
A squeal, a thud, and running feet tell us there has been a sighting, and we relax, knowing the children will be occupied for a while.
Grandme stands at the kitchen counter pulling out Tupperware containers full of homemade baked goods of every kind. She stands very erect, and her grey hair is swept upward, adding several inches to her stature. Behind her, the paned window has been polished crystal clear, and on the pristine, white-painted sill, African violets bloom in pink profusion.
Grandme is the first to begin the ritual storytelling as we sample coconut cake, then a cherry pie. The entire town knows when Grandme’s “kids” are coming, and in southern tradition, they all pitch in to help with the food. Grandme lets us assume she has made all these delicacies, and we don’t ask for recipes.
The week before our arrival, she begins, she came home from shopping, fed Boy, and began to sense another presence in the house. She called her next-door neighbor Lucy.
“Lucy?” she whispered. “Hey, honey, it’s me. Listen, I think there’s somebody in my house.”
The two women, neighbors for 60 years, who routinely scare each other with arrest accounts from the Courier-Tribune, armed themselves with kitchen utensils and began their search.
Boy, slinking around with them, appeared under beds, in closets, and on clothes chests, his green eyes wild and gleaming when confronted by the flashlight.
At last, the intruder was identified. An opossum, sound asleep under an upstairs sofa, had found the cat door convenient access to a good night’s rest. Boy, eyes bulging at the discovery, dissolved into the night like spilled ink.
We laugh at the story and refill our coffee cups; thick, rounded porcelain mugs you’d find in a small-town diner.
The children, exhausted, climb the stairs to bed and we adults settle down to gossip late into the night about all the aunts, sisters, brothers, and cousins not present. We can do this, of course, because we are family, and it is assumed we love each other unconditionally, if imperfectly. So, we gasp over Marcia’s affair, shake our heads woefully at Uncle Joe’s beer consumption, and discuss with genuine interest distant relations we will never meet.
Although these are not my blood relatives, they are my children’s, and by association, I can gasp and gossip with the rest of them. After all, we are a clan, kinfolk, a tribe. With that thought, I glance around at the photographs on the TV, the scrawled cards from the great-grandchildren on the refrigerator, and know that we each make this trip for a different reason, take home a different experience.
The children are compiling memories of a great-grandmother they will not always have. Their father is fondly reliving summer memories of his youth, and I am being healed.
My own family had little of this comfortable unity. My mother retained custody of my two older sisters and me, but we were no longer a family of five. We were Virginia and the girls. Divorce took more than a parent; it took our familyness,
When love has gone haywire in the past, it becomes even more important to create families of our own–a place where we can satisfy our innate need to belong to someone. That acceptance, wherever we can find it, is the healing and magnification of the human heart. It is through this experience in my own life that I have come to recognize a larger and larger group as family.
Even now, when a writer whose manuscript I’m working on complains about the state of publishing today, I nod with split attention, remembering that tonight, my family is going to enjoy homemade vegetable soup with crusty herb bread and Irish butter by the fire. Joy that is pure and simple gratitude wells up and spills over. I am spirit-rich. I am generous. I feel a connection to people I have not met, and I know it is real, though it is beyond my understanding. My family becomes the family of man, including this writer and his anxieties.
It is late when we rise to wash our coffee cups at the porcelain sink. The darkness outside has turned the kitchen window into a mirror, and our reflections break and mingle in the small panes.
We call the cat inside softly and prepare for bed. By midnight, the house is finally silent, and we whisper our goodnights to Grandme from the quilted four-poster bed in the guestroom.
But I am not a guest. Nor are you. We are simply family that has yet to meet.
Happy Thanksgiving, beloveds. Happy Thanksgiving.
Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.
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