At my grandparents' house, for the last time
This house, the house that my grandfather built in 1961 for his growing family, is a house for the morning. It's Jim's house, where he still rises early to pray and drink coffee. I used to sit on his knee as a little girl, waiting for the everyone to wake up, in the years before I learned about sleeping in. In the wood-panelled living room, beneath the Millet prints, I sat this morning reading in the great sunbeam that looms so large in my memory. And in the kitchen Mom and Dad and Memere and Papa sat arguing amiably over coffee while I helped myself to a buttered biscuit. I ignored them, and daydreamed out the kitchen window where they watch expectantly for birds and impatiently for squirrels and rabbits. I dream about gardens and trees and the green grass waiting under that snow, and the babies that have played on the sunlit floor, Anita, Caroline, Michael, Kenneth, and Mary and their descendents, some grown and having babies of their own.
But then maybe it is a house for the evening. It's Leona's house, where she cooks and potters and makes us comfortable. I used to wonder what they could talk about, all of the grown-ups through the evening hours, while I wandered the rooms, up late. It's in this house that we sit at Christmas and Easter, each year, around a table laid with more places than it can really fit, where we are hemmed in by turkey or roast beef and potatoes, salads, steamed vegetables, bread and good butter, milk and wine and tea and coffee and always, always pie. It's a house warm in winter, with places for everyone to sit and visit, and a kitchen for each day's games of cribbage and scrabble. I am sitting now in the soft lamplight, and it's quiet except for the ticking kitchen clock. It makes good sense for them to move out, to seek an easier life in a smaller home, but I know the evenings won't linger as they do now, sneaking a last butter tart or telling a last silly story before we toddle off to bed.
It's my mother's house, and her parents', and mine too. It's the place I grew up as much as any of the succession of houses I have settled briefly in during my brief unsettled life. Papa never wanted that for his children. As a boy he was moved from here to there, and built this house and made a place for even we, yet unborn, to cling to, with old familiar books on the shelves, and the old radio in the corner, and cross-stitched sayings lovingly framed and hung on the walls.
"Friends are flowers in the garden of life"
"The older the berry, the sweeter the juice"
And, with a butterfly embroidered on the corner,
"Give your children two things: one is roots, the other, wings."
But then maybe it is a house for the evening. It's Leona's house, where she cooks and potters and makes us comfortable. I used to wonder what they could talk about, all of the grown-ups through the evening hours, while I wandered the rooms, up late. It's in this house that we sit at Christmas and Easter, each year, around a table laid with more places than it can really fit, where we are hemmed in by turkey or roast beef and potatoes, salads, steamed vegetables, bread and good butter, milk and wine and tea and coffee and always, always pie. It's a house warm in winter, with places for everyone to sit and visit, and a kitchen for each day's games of cribbage and scrabble. I am sitting now in the soft lamplight, and it's quiet except for the ticking kitchen clock. It makes good sense for them to move out, to seek an easier life in a smaller home, but I know the evenings won't linger as they do now, sneaking a last butter tart or telling a last silly story before we toddle off to bed.
It's my mother's house, and her parents', and mine too. It's the place I grew up as much as any of the succession of houses I have settled briefly in during my brief unsettled life. Papa never wanted that for his children. As a boy he was moved from here to there, and built this house and made a place for even we, yet unborn, to cling to, with old familiar books on the shelves, and the old radio in the corner, and cross-stitched sayings lovingly framed and hung on the walls.
"Friends are flowers in the garden of life"
"The older the berry, the sweeter the juice"
And, with a butterfly embroidered on the corner,
"Give your children two things: one is roots, the other, wings."