Even though my parents moved us away from there when I was tiny, every summer and every holiday and most spring breaks were spent there until after Isabella was born. I even lived there for a year in college. It’s just home. It’s the dated but expensive real wood paneling in the dining room. It’s the green shag carpet in the guest bedroom. It’s the overheated kitchen and the same dining room table where we ate every holiday meal since I can remember. It’s the maple tree that started as a seedling at my great grandparents’ house across town. It’s the hay bales I climbed and the creek I roamed and the pasture where I learned to drive and the barn where I was rolled by a cow and watched lambs being born. It is gun oil, fresh tomatoes, wood smoke, and bread baking. It’s sitting at the bar listening to Grandma talk, and it was riding in the truck with Grandpa to check cows or go buy tractor parts.
We didn’t stop going for the holidays until we outgrew her house. Once there were three of us and then there were five and then seven and then nine and then after that, it seemed that we went from nine to seventeen in the blink of an eye. The farm just couldn’t accommodate my folks, us five kids and our spouses and children. Holidays moved to my parents house instead. That is good and it’s still a joyful thing. I miss going home though. I miss the Wilson clan gatherings and I know Grandma does too. Our hearts ache a bit.
Go ahead and judge away, but in the midst of warnings to limit our travel and stop the spread of Covid, Rachel and I went to see Grandma. Two Thanksgivings ago, Jack and Bell and I went up for the first few days of break to see them. It was the last time I got to see Grandpa at home next to his wood stove and hear the Wilson and Coble legends until long after we all should have been in bed. A week before our next visit was supposed to happen, he fell and broke his hip and that was the end of life as I knew it. In a month he was gone.
I know I could have picked up Covid on the way. I know I could have it and not know it and could have given it to Grandma. I also know that she is getting older and weaker and there is so much risk. There is also so much risk in not going. We NEED our families. Our hearts and minds need the connection of the ones we love. She needed to tell the stories of her family tree and needed to show us her quilts and to walk with me across the yard and show me her plants. She can talk to me on the phone, but that’s not the same. We talked from the from the time we got there until we got in the car to come home. So many words yet it was just a drop in the bucket for all the words we needed to say. So yes, judge me for not doing my part to slow the spread, but I think people can suffer just as much from depression and sadness as they can Covid. Her health is failing. There won’t be many more trips, and it is really simple. She needed us now. She has my cousins and that makes all the difference, but I thinks she needed us, the granddaughters too.
I needed her as well. I needed to soak up her words and gestures. I needed to go home again. It really is where I think of as home. It’s a place of magic and love that doesn’t exist anywhere else. I weep as I type this morning. My cousin lives with her now, and I know he will take care of the place when she is gone, but once she is gone, the light will go out and the magic will be gone. I needed to go now and soak up the magic of home and the magic of my last grandparent before they are gone.
No comments:
Post a Comment