I sat down to listen to music my Grandmother would never know, in a place my grandmother has never visited, in a home that has not felt her hands. I didn’t realize when I sat down that it was finally time to outline this next chapter. This has been the chapter that I have feared the most, the chapter that I have put off, but strangely the chapter with the most enticing title, a title I wrote many years ago, long before I realized this would require writing.
The last time I spoke to Elsie, she offered me all the photo albums she had left. We went through old boxes, I gathered treasures many would throw away. She was insistent that I take a few things, one of those things, was a list of sayings… an apocryphal gospel she was raised with, quotes from the Bible, her mother, her grandmother, and her friends. A code used to understand the world around her, at least the world she knew, a world as foreign to me as this world was foreign to her. It was as if she needed to know that our worlds were connected.
She never owned a computer. She was my bridge to the past, my bridge to a world long gone. When walking into her home, I felt like I was stepping into the past. She was nestled in a valley, with a small creek baptizing the land, in a place no cell phone signal dare touch, and though I know it was because of the mountains, the mystical part in me, that Grandma helped to grow, assumed the mountains considered the signal anathema to the timeless nature of the land that surrounded my grandmother. That is was timeless, because she was timeless.
And as we sat and talked, I felt something very profound, peace. On the porch of this little house hung a swing, on the swing sat Elsie, in the chair sat Dutch, and in between sat… me. I drank coke in my younger days, coffee as I grew older, but I always ate an oatmeal cream pie. I lost track of the hours we spent on the swing, I once preached that heaven must be a front porch swing, overlooking a large evergreen tree, complete with a coffee and an oatmeal cookie, because I could envision no place so peaceful as this.
I can’t remember a thing we said, I don’t know if the words were necessary, only the presence of mind, body and most of all, of soul. Her home was a magical place, where light refracted from window crystals, casting rainbows in the kitchen, and the basement full of the wonders of days gone by, where my cousins, brother, and I would play detective or musician.
So many treasures, I asked her once about a chair hanging on the wall, she told me came from her grandmother’s kitchen table, so I did the only thing I knew to do, I asked her if I could have the chair. I still have that chair, and no one sits on it, but I remember to tell anyone who asks (and many who don’t) that it sat on my grandmother’s, grandmother’s kitchen table. Her home was full of endless treasures… endless stories… and endless love.
So… though she has never physically touched this space, it is saturated by her spirit. Not just because of the chair, or glasses, or the plates (seriously she gave me a lot of stuff), or even the paper, written in her hand covered in sayings.
Grandma’s magic was faith, hope, and love. And, every time the crystal in our window refracts a rainbow, I am filled with her faith, hope, and love. But even without the rainbow and crystal, her touch, and her voice, her spirit will never be gone from me, because when Grandma gave you her love it was forever.
