Meditation
Nov. 20th, 2010 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pen_gruntI wanted to sleep on the plane back from Arizona, if only to avoid a particularly chatty seat-mate (who told me, with good intentions and an eye toward flirtation, that I should be on packaging for Wisconsin butter or Minnesota Airlines or some other such stereotypical midwestern thing). And I was tired. But NOT tired enough to fall asleep.
So I closed my eyes and tried to recall, first, my grandpa Harold's voice and then my grandma June's laughter. Then their faces and bodies. The things they'd said to me. The smell of them.
Then, in my mind, I walked up their front walk and entered their house. It's been changed since they both died, but I made a mental exercise of picturing it how it was when I was a child. The living room with taupe carpeting and the plant stand with the Swedish dala horse and the african violets. The macrame plant holder in the corner with spider plants and the floor-to-ceiling tension lamp from the 50's. The clink of the brass lamp pull as you released it to turn on the warm light, and the heating vent that saw many a days of me curled up around it. I miss heating vents.
My grandmother in the kitchen and making fish and rice and canned peas for supper. Black raspberry "sauce" for dessert in small white bowls with a green striped rim. Or mornings with cereal and orange juice and milk with a bevy of multivitamins lined up beside the cheery yellow-orange small plastic glasses. The Swedish folk art drawing that is now on my bookshelf. The ceramic tool mobile above the kitchen sink, right by the painted tile that read, "June's Kitchen". The step-stool chair by the phone. The buns warming in the white oven for Thanksgiving or Christmas. The magnets--all made by Grandma's ladies auxiliary hospital volunteers to put on the trays of patients on holidays.
The closet, then still full with grandpa's old-fashioned hats. Coats. Gloves.
The hallway with its small stand in the focal point and pictures of the grandkids and extended relatives. The Bible and the photo albums. The cross hanging on the wall.
The den with the black leather davenport that would fold out into a bed. Floor multicolored and clean of the clutter of later years. The den closet with Grandma June's suitcoats. Games on the top shelf. Reward--long gone. The organ and the cinderblock shelves with books and toys and reams of print-shop scrap paper that my grandfather reassembled into pads--held together on one end with thick red paper glue. The sewing machine. The multi-tiered button box. The black metal garbage can.
The bathroom with its medicine chest full of curiosities--expired and not. Florescent light that was harsh on a teenage girl's blemishes. Baths full of warm, soapy water--my first bath ever--in the showerless tub.
My grandparents bedroom. Small. Plain. Matched dressers that look retro-cool now, but were purchased new in the 40's or 50's. Curtains in sunny yellow floral that matched the bedspread. A sparse, plain bed. My grandmother's earring tree that held such fascination...earrings of plain gold knots, shark's teeth, bright red buttons, pearly middleastern shells that she got in Jerusalem.
My waking mind transitions and I am in the house, wandering from room to room. Seeking my grandmother at the kitchen window, my grandfather in his chair in the living room--reading the newspaper. I walk from room to room. Room to room. Searching and not finding. Every object as I remember it in my childhood. The echo of their voices, the smell of their house and their essential personhood so clear in my mind. I keep turning corners and expecting them to be there. I keep waiting for my grandma June to pop in from some other room that I haven't searched yet with her wink and tongue-cluck and greet me.
Yet I cannot find them. They are gone. And I miss them terribly.
But I wake feeling like I've been in a warm, safe place. I consciously go through the rooms again, free of sleep, and notice objects. Remembering. The thought of forgetting anything--the pictures of my great-grandparents on the walls, the cut-tops of the cereal boxes, the small bible and Guideposts that my grandpa held together with a rubber band and used to read before dinner--anything at all is heartbreaking. So I go over it again and again, reinforcing the frailty of the mind and tying everything together with the sounds of their voices that are gone forever save in my memory.
So I closed my eyes and tried to recall, first, my grandpa Harold's voice and then my grandma June's laughter. Then their faces and bodies. The things they'd said to me. The smell of them.
Then, in my mind, I walked up their front walk and entered their house. It's been changed since they both died, but I made a mental exercise of picturing it how it was when I was a child. The living room with taupe carpeting and the plant stand with the Swedish dala horse and the african violets. The macrame plant holder in the corner with spider plants and the floor-to-ceiling tension lamp from the 50's. The clink of the brass lamp pull as you released it to turn on the warm light, and the heating vent that saw many a days of me curled up around it. I miss heating vents.
My grandmother in the kitchen and making fish and rice and canned peas for supper. Black raspberry "sauce" for dessert in small white bowls with a green striped rim. Or mornings with cereal and orange juice and milk with a bevy of multivitamins lined up beside the cheery yellow-orange small plastic glasses. The Swedish folk art drawing that is now on my bookshelf. The ceramic tool mobile above the kitchen sink, right by the painted tile that read, "June's Kitchen". The step-stool chair by the phone. The buns warming in the white oven for Thanksgiving or Christmas. The magnets--all made by Grandma's ladies auxiliary hospital volunteers to put on the trays of patients on holidays.
The closet, then still full with grandpa's old-fashioned hats. Coats. Gloves.
The hallway with its small stand in the focal point and pictures of the grandkids and extended relatives. The Bible and the photo albums. The cross hanging on the wall.
The den with the black leather davenport that would fold out into a bed. Floor multicolored and clean of the clutter of later years. The den closet with Grandma June's suitcoats. Games on the top shelf. Reward--long gone. The organ and the cinderblock shelves with books and toys and reams of print-shop scrap paper that my grandfather reassembled into pads--held together on one end with thick red paper glue. The sewing machine. The multi-tiered button box. The black metal garbage can.
The bathroom with its medicine chest full of curiosities--expired and not. Florescent light that was harsh on a teenage girl's blemishes. Baths full of warm, soapy water--my first bath ever--in the showerless tub.
My grandparents bedroom. Small. Plain. Matched dressers that look retro-cool now, but were purchased new in the 40's or 50's. Curtains in sunny yellow floral that matched the bedspread. A sparse, plain bed. My grandmother's earring tree that held such fascination...earrings of plain gold knots, shark's teeth, bright red buttons, pearly middleastern shells that she got in Jerusalem.
My waking mind transitions and I am in the house, wandering from room to room. Seeking my grandmother at the kitchen window, my grandfather in his chair in the living room--reading the newspaper. I walk from room to room. Room to room. Searching and not finding. Every object as I remember it in my childhood. The echo of their voices, the smell of their house and their essential personhood so clear in my mind. I keep turning corners and expecting them to be there. I keep waiting for my grandma June to pop in from some other room that I haven't searched yet with her wink and tongue-cluck and greet me.
Yet I cannot find them. They are gone. And I miss them terribly.
But I wake feeling like I've been in a warm, safe place. I consciously go through the rooms again, free of sleep, and notice objects. Remembering. The thought of forgetting anything--the pictures of my great-grandparents on the walls, the cut-tops of the cereal boxes, the small bible and Guideposts that my grandpa held together with a rubber band and used to read before dinner--anything at all is heartbreaking. So I go over it again and again, reinforcing the frailty of the mind and tying everything together with the sounds of their voices that are gone forever save in my memory.
