Through a Glass, Darkly

When I was little, it seems that I spent a lot of time during the summer at Grandma’s house. I say Grandma instead of Grandma and Grandpa because, when I was little, Grandpa was still working for Gulf and he would leave very early in the morning and be gone most of the day. Some of my favorite childhood memories come from Grandma’s house. When I was nine, we moved ten minutes away from Grandma, and when I was ten or eleven, my mom went back to work and we’d go stay at Grandma’s house after school. We had lots of fun times then, too, but these memories are mostly from younger days, when going to Grandma’s was more rare.

In May, we’d go help pick strawberries. I don’t honestly remember being tempted to just eat the strawberries off the plant, because they were so dusty and muddy. But Mom and my Aunt Nancy and Grandma would clean them up and cut them into pieces and put a healthy spoonful of sugar on them for us to eat. We’d get to eat the fresh, sweet strawberries while the grownups worked on the jam and the canning and the freezing.

Later in the summer, my brother and I would stay at Grandma’s for a week in the summer so that we could go to Vacation Bible School at her church. My family always went to nondenominational churches that didn’t really have VBS. At VBS, I’d learn the pledge to the Christian flag and the pledge to the Bible, two things that continue to mystify Mike. We’d eat those cookies with the scalloped edges and the hole in the middle that you can also wear as rings (butter cookies?) and make ourselves sick letting big kids spin us on the merry-go-round on the church playground. After we’d get home from VBS, we’d have lunch and watch TV and eat Fritos. Grandma always had Fritos. I don’t even like Fritos that much, but I’d eat them there. Sometimes, depending on when it was in the summer, we’d help snap green beans and shell lima beans and shuck corn. I remember helping with the planting sometimes, too. And there were baby cows to feed – they needed a bottle, and Grandma would sometimes let us hold the bottle for them.

Sometimes my mom’s cousins’s children (points to those of you who know what they’d be to me) would come over, and we’d play baseball in the backyard. When Grandpa came home, he’d do some work with the tractor, and if he was in an extra-special good mood, he’d let us ride with him. When my cousin David was there, we’d play hide-and-seek and blow bubbles for hours. One of the boys hid in Grandma’s clothes hamper and we figured it out and trapped him in there and knocked it over. Grandma’s house wasn’t about safety first. It was about dirty knees and sticky hands and that exhausted feeling you get from playing hard all day long.

After VBS, my mom would pick us up and take us home, but that wasn’t it for the summer! We’d still get day trips to Grandma’s so mom could help with whatever freezing or canning that Grandma was working on at that point. Sometimes the entire family would get together – all of mom’s siblings and their spouses and children would fill the house and the yard.

Grandma’s house was packed with amazing things that my house didn’t have. You could scrape the frost off the size of the old freezer and eat it – it was just like eating snow! Grandma found out how much my brother, my cousin David, and I fought over the banana Popsicles, so she’d buy boxes of just the banana ones! She kept a glass jug of cold water in her refrigerator – it was always about half full, though I never saw her fill it up. I have never had water as cold and refreshing as the water that came from that jug. We could eat grapes straight from the vine, but they were the grapes you had to squeeze to get the fruit. My mom didn’t buy grapes like that. There were fresh things I liked, like tomatoes, and fresh things I didn’t like, like cantaloupe.

After mom went back to work, Grandma’s house was about pizza rolls every day after school and Grandpa teaching me rummy every day when he got home. It was about solitaire and riding bikes as far as we dared without getting caught and eating dinner with Dan Rather. It was about Jell-O cheesecake that Grandma made just because she knew I liked it.

And those rare occasions that I still got to spend the night at Grandma’s? Well, those evenings were filled with Andy Griffith and Wheel of Fortune. And sometimes Grandpa would watch Cheers, which Grandma said was a good show except for all the beer that the characters drank.

This summer, Grandma has promised me that when she makes tomato juice she’ll let me know so I can help and learn how. You’d think I would know more about that kind of thing since I was present for it every year, but I don’t. And now I’m starting to worry that I won’t ever get the chance to learn. So much of that stuff is already gone – Grandma doesn’t have cows anymore, or plant much of a garden. It’s so different than it was.

I have to admit, though . . . it still makes me feel like a little kid to go to Grandma’s house and see the sheets and towels on the clothesline, flapping in the wind. Let me give you a tip: If you’re really still and there’s not much breeze, those sheets can be a good place to hide so even the cleverest of cousins can’t find you.