Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children. ~ Alex Haley

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Grandma proudly labeled this photo "Our Gum tree, fall of 1990," I saw when I inherited her photos in 2001.  Papa and Grandma's trees and gardens were brilliant, and I always loved how their house was nestled behind the trees and Rhododendrons, but to me, the true caption for this picture is Home.  Or Love.  Childhood.  Safety.  Ever since I was a kid, whenever I've had those crazy panicked someone-is-chasing-me sort of nightmares, I've always thought "I have to get to Papa and Grandma's.  I just need to make it to Papa and Grandma's."  And in every dream, every time, their beautiful yard suddenly appears in the distance as I run and I know I just need to reach it in order to be safe.  The Bad Guys disappear at my grandparents' house, Papa and Grandma's bee boxes and raspberry bushes and tree swing serving as my dream world's line of demarcation.  People who have had near-death experiences often report that they passed through a peaceful tunnel and were greeted by a glowing light; When my time comes, I want to find myself in Papa and Grandma's yard--just long enough to get my bearings straight, you understand.  Oddly, it is almost exactly three years to the day since I last wrote here about missing my grandparents' yard.  Maybe autumn just makes me especially nostalgic.  Or maybe there really is some magic in this simple gray-shingled house and the trees that surround it, just as there is something special about every place we love that we feel loves us back.  

 

 

 

 

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Pine Needles

One side of my grandparents’ yard was a sloped grove of pine trees. When we were kids, my brothers and I would make elaborate mazes and forts out of the blankets of pine needles beneath the trees, digging and tunneling with our bare hands until the dark soil under them was exposed and we had created enough paths for a good game of chase in the shade. I never thought to take any pictures of our pine needle wonderland, but this favorite picture of Papa and Grandma shows some of the pine trees down the slope behind them.

And thanks to online mapping and its incredible “street view” feature, when I look up my grandparents' old address, I can see a bit of that same view from the opposite perspective, looking up the hill toward their house: The trees and their pine needle carpet and all of it in the shade that made it feel even more magical.

My grandmother died exactly five weeks after my grandfather, over Memorial Day weekend of 2001, and a week or so later, before the property changed hands and the new owners moved into the house, I made one last visit to my grandparents’ house with my then-boyfriend. After giving him an extensive walking tour of the mostly-empty house and yard, I asked him to lock the front door for me. While he did, I sat down on the brick steps of the front porch, breathing in those pine needles one last time, and fumbled around in my overalls’ pockets for a tissue that wasn’t already in wet shreds. Finding none I wiped my face on my his shoulder. “How do I leave?” I choked out. “How do I just leave now?” We never came up with any answer besides the obvious: You just do. You have to, so you do. What’s amazing, we decided that afternoon, isn’t that it ends and you find a way to go on, but instead that two people can love each other enough to create a home so good and so beautiful that their granddaughter would want to show it to one of her friends and tell him all about it.

Today after my run, I walked around my current neighborhood a little and stopped at a yard nearby with its own small patch of pine trees. And for the first time since that final visit to Papa and Grandma's house nine years ago, I bent down to separate a plush carpet of pine needles with my bare hands until a hole appeared. The neighbors, if they notice the hole at all, will likely suspect an animal had been digging there today, but they will never know how much that "animal" wanted to keep burrowing until an elaborate maze had been constructed in their yard. And call out to her brothers that it was ready and we could start the chase now. And laugh and shriek with them over every frantic slippery step that resulted in falling into a pile of pushed-aside pine needles. And look up every now and then, with pine needles and dirt in her hair, to wave to her grandparents as they smile down at her from the living room window.

As Old Friend and I headed toward the car to leave Papa and Grandma's house for the last time that day in 2001, I scooped up a handful of pine needles and a pine cone to keep at home with other treasures. Today before walking away from the neighbors' yard to walk home, I took only pictures. How do I leave? How do I just leave now? You just do. You take what you can and move on.

Bee Boxes

My grandfather, my beloved Papa, kept honey bees in a few bee boxes in his and Grandma's yard. I wasn't as interested in all of that while my grandparents were alive as I am now, and I wish I had been: I want to keep bees someday too, and while I will learn the how-to when I need to, I wish I had the memories of having learned all about beekeeping firsthand from Papa. I would watch the bees from a safe distance as some exited the boxes and others flew toward them, and I was fascinated by the design of the honeycombs Papa would bring into the kitchen--the honeycombs are edible, although my parents still wince when they tell the tale of the time Papa bit into a honeycomb and ended up swallowing a live bee--but I didn't pay attention to the actual honey-gathering. While helping my parents clear out my grandparents' house in 2001, we came across an old instructional booklet on beekeeping, and I was shocked to realize that Papa hadn't always known how to do this either--that he too had been interested and had had to learn from others. There is comfort in that knowledge for me.

My very last visit to my grandparents' house about a month after they had died, I waffled for an hour over whether to disassemble the bee boxes and pack them into the car to take with me, but I ultimately decided to leave them behind. I didn't want the bee boxes unless I could also have the sloped part of the yard they had always sat on, near where my childhood Beagle was gently buried by Papa, across from the raspberry bushes and tomato plants and flower gardens, feet away from Papa's thinking tree. . . . I didn't want to keep the bee boxes unless I could also keep Papa and Grandma's yard and house and Papa and Grandma always inside. I sometimes think I should have taken the bee boxes after all, though, and just lived with the heartache of their missed surroundings. I don't know.

Papa and Grandma and their bee boxes and their jars of fresh honey are all on my mind tonight as I keep adding store-bought honey to hot tea as I battle a cold, and also because I had a sad dream about my grandparents last night. I have dreamed of them only a handful of times since they died in the spring of 2001, and most of those dreams have been nightmares like last night's. I miss Papa and Grandma so much, and part of me will never believe that if I knocked on their door right now, they wouldn't open it and welcome me inside. Ah, Life. I am so blessed just to have had a "Papa and Grandma" at all, and I will someday have another happy dream of them, and I believe there will eventually be a reunion. Papa and Grandma missed people they had loved, as well, there are still bees out there traveling back and forth from boxes to flower gardens, and life goes on. 

To Papa and Grandma

Tomorrow, July 1st, is my grandparents’ wedding anniversary. To celebrate, I’m making Papa’s gnocchi and meatballs and Grandma’s chocolate cream pie for my parents and brothers. As at all of our family dinners, there will be much laughter and teasing and no small amount of love. At tomorrow’s dinner, we thank Papa and Grandma for setting the example.

One Sunday afternoon while we were all visiting at their house when I was a kid, Grandma started talking about her and Papa’s wedding day. They had dated for a year and a half and were 28 and 29 when they got married; Grandma was a year older. When she mentioned how “jittery” she’d been that day, I interrupted, “Why were you nervous?!? It was just Papa!” She, Papa, and the rest of the family laughed and laughed, but it was many years before I understood that they hadn’t always been “Papa and Grandma,” let alone that they weren’t “Papa and Grandma” to each other. I laugh now, too, thinking about it, but a part of me wishes I could sit them both down tonight and say, “Really, in all honesty, you guys didn’t know that it would work out like this? You truly didn’t know that this would be your story? You really didn’t see all of this?” Forget space: just as I was as a child, I am still at least as taken aback at the thought of “Papa and Grandma” having a beginning or an end.

Had I had the foresight, I would have been sure to ask my grandparents all kinds of things about their courtship and marriage, but I didn’t have what could be considered my first date until after they both had died, so by the time I cared enough to know the answers, it was too late to ask the questions. Once when I was in college, Papa delved into the topic, but I was too embarrassed and self-conscious to discuss it in any real way. “You’re not interested in the boys yet, are you?” were the words he found, and it was more of a statement than a question. Assuming he wouldn’t understand, I simply answered, “I haven’t found any yet who interest me. I’m—I’m picky.” Feeling stupid, I half-expected him to laugh, but he didn’t, of course. He just nodded his head slowly and, squeezing the back of my neck, responded, “That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with being picky.” Had I been braver, I’d have admitted to him and Grandma that I doubted I’d ever find a man I loved as much as I loved him—and that I didn’t think, dateless all my life as I’d been, that even if I did someday find such a man, that he would love me in return. Papa had set the bar. The summer after I graduated from college, I’d started writing a poem about him, but seven years later, I still haven’t finished it. I get as far as “You were my first hero, Papa, and the first man I ever said ‘I love you’ to,” and I again set it aside to work on another time. It has always just seemed too much to hope for: a husband as fine as my grandfather, a marriage as blessed as my grandparents’.  This is a conversation I now wish the three of us had had.

 When Grandma called one afternoon to let us know that Papa died, a few months before what would have been my grandparents’ 62nd wedding anniversary, my parents and brothers and I left our jobs for the day and raced to gather to be with her. As we sat around her in chairs and at her feet, Grandma handed me a book of her favorite poems and asked me to read “Should You Go First” by Albert Kennedy "Rosey" Rowswell. She had been reading it to herself just before we’d arrived, she explained. The last stanza buoyed her but further broke my heart; She was imagining their reunion--only five weeks away, not that any of us knew that then--and I was just aching for the past.  

“Should you go first and I remain,
One thing I'd have you do:
Walk slowly down that long, lone path,
For soon I'll follow you.
I'll want to know each step you take
That I may walk the same,
For some day down that lonely road
You'll hear me call your name.”
 

At Papa’s viewing, Grandma joined me at his casket and tried to get me to stop crying, but it was quite awhile before I collected myself enough to see and speak, and when I did, Papa’s hands were what caught my attention. He wasn’t wearing a wedding band. I asked my grandmother if she had kept his ring, and she replied that Papa had never worn one. I had never even noticed. He just never wanted one, Grandma explained, and the extra expense at the time they got married didn’t seem worth it. I nodded in understanding, and Grandma pulled me closer and said, “He always said that we were his jewels, our children and I--and later on, you kids, of course.” That set me off again, and Grandma rubbed the small of my back as I wept.
 

My grandparents didn’t exchange birthday or anniversary or Christmas presents with each other, and neither had grown up in a time or family that encouraged demonstrativeness or sentimentality. I never saw them kiss or hug. But Grandma would cook and bake Papa’s favorite foods, and Papa never returned from a walk in the woods without a bouquet of wildflowers for Grandma. He teasingly called her his “little Napoleon” because she was French—her family had come here from France years before Papa’s had arrived from Italy—and she would begin all of her retorts to him with a combination “Shhhhh!” and clucking sound. In 1993, my mom bought Grandma a book to fill out for me and my brothers in which she was to record her anecdotes and memories. A line in the book asks for a description of how she and Papa spent their days. She stayed busy with the “usual household chores,” Grandma dryly reported, and Papa spent his days “working, gardening, and picking at me.” I laugh as I reread that now, and I’m also remembering that my grandfather would often tell her, “You know what? You’re a good kid, Mum!” It would make us all smile, Papa working his charm this way on a now-blushing-but-still-pretending-to-be-annoyed Grandma. You’re a good kid, Mum!
As the final guests left the viewing, I asked my mom if she was sure that Grandma understood that she wouldn’t get to see Papa again after that night—it would be closed casket for the next morning’s funeral—and she said she thought so but went over to Grandma to see if she wanted to go up to the casket one last time before we took her home. Grandma did, and exhausted by the past few days, was gently led by some of the family to the front of the room. After a few moments, she collapsed onto Papa’s chest and whimpered, “Goodnight, my buddy.” My mom and just about everyone else in earshot completely dissolved then and hurried to help her, but I stood by momentarily too stunned to cry or move. It had just dawned on me that above everything else, my grandparents were each other’s friends. The very last thing she ever said to him taught me what I had most needed to know about marriage—and what I most wanted out of my own. After 62 years--more than six decades! more than half a century!--the very last time she looked at him, she was seeing “my buddy.” My buddy. “Papa and Grandma” was a friendship. Papa and Grandma were friends.


As a swift kick when we were already down, the morning we received the florist’s bill for Papa’s funeral arrangements, we also got the phone call letting us know that Grandma died. The only peace there was to be had that day was in the hope that they were finally (out of pain and) together again. Even in those short five weeks after Papa had died and we would speak of going to visit Grandma, it had been “going down to Papa and Grandma’s.” Before Papa had died, the only nights they had ever spent apart were those of my grandmother’s three maternity stays. Grandma had been ill the last six months of her life and had lived just as long as her doctors had predicted, but the fact that Papa passed on one month and Grandma the next still struck us as a detail most-fitting to their story. One of my second cousins told me at Grandma’s funeral that my grandparents “could have been a TV show!” As we sat beside each other waiting for the service to begin, she turned in her chair to face me and laughed in half-whispers, “Ohhhhhh, when they would start in on each other! You know, [your grandmother] didn’t have his sense of humor--she was so dry and quiet about things--but she still gave it right back to him! When we were kids, we’d look forward to their visits just to hear them together!”

Had I ever put any thought into it while my grandparents were alive, I’d have been able to figure most of this out, of course. That they were people before they were grandparents and each other’s friends above and beyond “Papa and Grandma” should have been no mystery. And I suppose I did understand these things on some level. While I was staying with them one summer week as a kid, the song “Friends and Lovers” came on the radio during lunch. Grandma liked it and asked why they didn’t make more nice songs like that. I was mortified--the song was about lovers!--and tried to change the subject. If 30-year-old Val could have a do-over of that moment, she would leave the blushing 10-year-old to her pancakes and listen more closely to the tale her grandparents were telling, for however long they had to tell it. Was Papa always your buddy, Grandma, or did he gradually become that to you? I am interested in the boys now, Papa, if you want to talk? There are no do-overs, though, so after saying thanks tomorrow for the gathering of family over gnocchi and pie, I will pray to Papa and Grandma that I paid enough attention to their story to shape a sweet one of my own.