In the Paths of My Ancestors

“What do you think, Sissy?”

If Sissy had an opinion, she kept it to herself. We were sitting on the front porch swing, she and I, enjoying the mild early autumn afternoon. I took her silence as agreement.

The swing wasn’t the original one, but it hung where the old one had. The tree was the same, though – a bit more gnarled, maybe, a little thicker, but its essence was the same. Around the other side of the tree, the roots still held the shape of a small throne that was now just the right size for my daughter.

Sissy shifted her weight and the swing began to sway. I reached up and pulled on the chain to steady our movement. She yawned and rested her chin on my leg, ears twitching to ward off flies.

How many times had I found Grandma sitting here, her old dog curled up on the swing next to her? Probably just as many times as she had gone looking for me and found me ensconced on my tree-root throne, daydreaming.

We were both daydreamers, Grandma and I. We liked to say we saw stories in our heads, but I think most people would have dismissed us as a dotty old woman and an over imaginative child. We often took long walks together, telling each other stories and living whatever fresh adventure was to be found in the fields or the woods or the pond or the garden.

I knew I was her favorite grandchild. She told me I was. She told everyone that, and claimed I could do no wrong, right in front of me. I knew better, of course, but I was determined to keep the wool over her eyes in that regard, so I was always on my best behavior when I was with her. I was in my forties before I realized I had fallen for the cleverest ploy to control an unruly child ever. My Grandma may not have had much formal education, but she was one smart cookie.

I chuckled at the memory and stretched my legs out in front of me. Looking at my feet, another flood of memory washed over me. Summer mornings, sitting in the swing with her, sorting potatoes or shelling peas. My legs weren’t long enough for my feet to reach the ground, but that was ok, because she always did the legwork to keep us moving in a gentle rhythm. While we worked, we talked, the companionable conversation of two like souls. She talked to me like I was a grown-up. No one else did that. She let me drink coffee, too. That was one of our secrets.

We had our rituals for every season. In the fall, waking up at Grandma’s on Saturday morning meant slipping out of bed at first light and padding to the kitchen. Grandma would have my bowl ready, and the sun would be just rising when we set off to milk. At Grandma’s call, the milk cow would lumber into her stall and set to munching the oats I poured into her trough. I would hand Grandma my bowl, and the first fresh, warm milk was for me.

“And it was good, too, Sissy!” Hearing her name, she twitched her velvety ears and opened her eyes to peer at me without lifting her head. I scratched absently between her ears and the eyes slid closed again. The memories closed in again, too, and I saw myself sitting alone in the swing, a young woman in my twenties, wearing a black dress. My feet were on the ground, this time, and Grandma was in a box at the little church in town. I saw my cousins filing out the front door, loading into cars to go to the church. At the church, I sat at the piano and played all her favorite old songs. Fortunately, I knew most of them by heart, because the music kept blurring before my eyes as I played. When the time came to walk past the casket and say goodbye, I found I could not. I did not want to remember her that way, still and pale and shrunken.

I squeezed my eyes closed tightly to chase away the tears. Giving Sissy one last scratch, I stood up and walked to the tree. I laid my hand on its rough trunk. My dad had grown up with this tree, playing and doing chores in its generous shade. My grandfather, Francis, had been a boy of fourteen when my great-grandfather Elijah planted it. Before that, my great-great-grandmother Lucinda kept chickens there. Four generations of my forebears had stood in the spot where I stood now. Now my daughter had played here, too. I wondered if she would ever feel the connection to the place that I did.

“Time to go in, Sissy. It’s starting to get dark.” She and I walked through the front door – a set of double church doors I had run through into Grandma’s arms so many times as a child – and I closed it behind us. Through the living room, down the hall, and into the big dining room / kitchen at the far end of the house. Her kitchen. She had been gone for fifteen years, but it would always be her kitchen.

As I entered the kitchen, I caught an echo in my mind – Grandma standing there at the sink, washing dishes. My Grandpa innocently walking past her to the ice box and pouring a glass of tea. Him reaching out and swatting her behind, and her grabbing a broom and chasing him around the kitchen, both of them giggling like schoolchildren…

The echo faded, but the grin on my face lingered. I had a photograph of them, in their sixties, sitting on the couch together. They’re snuggled together like teenagers, her hand on his thigh. That’s the way they always were, in my memory. The later years when Alzheimer’s took her memory and diabetes took his leg are blurred in my mental film reel, like someone deliberately damaged the images. And maybe I did. Maybe I did.

I tidied up in the kitchen and turned out the light, then walked out onto the back porch and into the yard. In the evening’s dying light I could just make out the outline of the old milk barn across the field. I pictured a stooped old woman and a gawky preadolescent girl walking towards it, and thought of the generations before us who had walked the same path. The first stars winked into view as I stood there, and I knew, if I listened really hard, I would hear Grandma’s voice singing, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star…”