Hey Gram! in anticlimatic

I keep meaning to get out to visit my grandma, but work has been relentless this winter season. I miss her though, and I don’t know how long I have left with her. She’s very old, now my oldest living relative. Great grandmother to a bevy of great grandchildren. And she lives alone, in the house on the hill, in the woods- looking out over the garden and the rolling fields from her high, shady porch. My grandpa built the house himself with wood he salvaged from a collapsed barn on nearly free homesteading property. There was an old fishing pole hanging on one of the support beams in their vaulted ceiling- old barn beam with notches cut out of it- he said he found it in the barn when he was collecting wood and hung it up forever after as a keepsake to it. Huge round wooden reel. Thought it might be worth some money as an antique, but it was a fairly common and cheap model for what it was. Just sentimental to him. A little token of whoever first used and then left behind his house, slightly altered.

In the basement they had a massive decorative antique cast iron wood stove that would heat most of the house, most of the winter- and one of those old refrigerators from the 40s or 50s with the handle that didn’t quite do the job of latching and opening at the same time like you would hope- big chrome lever of a thing- to the effect that you would always have to pull the lever to open the latch, then shove the door closed while holding the lever open, then shove the lever closed WHILE holding the door closed, just to get it to close and latch together.

In this fridge they had Clearly Canadian sodas, which came in these round-as-apples glass jars, and were of ginger ale, root beer, and club soda I believe. I have one particular childhood memory of riding out to their house on bicycles with my mom and my brother- a tremendous, memorable expedition of bright golden fields, crickets, blacktop, and empty country roads of rolling hills and broken tracks. I remember finally getting there, getting out of the sun, and going down into the basement for one of those crisp round Clearly Canadian root beers- then enjoying it in the cool kitchen that always smelled like succulents in the afternoon, coffee in the morning, and cooked green peppers in the evening.

I think about her house and the memories I have in it, and the fact that she is still there and so is the house. My other grandmother, my late grandmother on my father’s side, she lived next door to my parents- and I barely visited her for a decade. Then she died, and some assholes moved into her house, and I’ll never get to drop in on her ever again.

Never get to just let myself in through that old wooden first back door, into the cluttered moth ball stenched rear room of the house which was never heated for some reason. Then through the inner door, into the warmth and the sound of your own boots stomping the snow off onto the rug and hollering into the house “YO GRAM! IT’S ME” then meeting her 4 feet down the hall, past the tiny bathroom, in the kitchen. Apron on, kettle of chop suey on the stove, old aluminum tiny kitchen table pushed up against the window with the bird feeders in it hanging outside, the two aluminum chairs with the springy 1960s fake leather seats, a table with two lacy place settings- this was just the kitchen table, for hanging out purposes, the dining room table in just the next room was where large gatherings were hosted- and between the lacy place settings a tea tray with sugar cubes and the like, and against the wall crystal glass jars of cheap gummy candy and holiday candy, and all over the entire house an army of tiny cute figurines and little nick knacks she picked up on yard sales, something her and her friends never missed on Saturdays after cutting the addresses out of the papers the night before.

Never again get to sit down at that little table, and have her sit down with me, plopping something in front of me, and just listening to me talk over the police scanner going in the background. That smell of stale camel cigarettes’ from my uncle jeff who still lived there in a room off the kitchen. Sometimes he would emerge, shirtless, smoking, to grab a beer or to wander through and off. He’s gone too.

The way places can just be gone.
Converted into new places, someone elses places.
Never sits right with me.