Syrup Summer

It is late May in New England, and the wind in my grandmother’s yard is oozing like syrup. We are at our boiling point, my grandmother and I; we can’t agree on a goddamn thing. I came back east at the start of summer to help, and it seems I’ve done nothing but annoy; it is as if I am a fruit fly. According to her, I have no common sense. According to me, she is as stubborn as the day is long, and, for the past three weeks, the days have never seemed to end. It seems she has left for the morning, and I did not care to ask where she was headed. I am thankful for the solitude. I think I’ll sit down and write.

This woman has never gotten rid of a single thing, her home is stuffed like a big, fat pepper. I’ve come to help her make some cuts around this place; cuts she is most uninterested in making. She is an able woman, who I often need to talk down from a ten-foot ladder somewhere above a lilac tree. She stands no more than five feet tall and loves to give orders. The skin on her cheeks and chest mirrors this deep river valley that she grew up in. She has four cats and eleven lawnmowers. She can shoot a squirrel and make a soup of it. I cried when she trapped a raccoon the other day and insist on wearing gloves while working the yard. It is because of silliness like this that she does not take me seriously.

Sweat has showered us for the past two days as we’ve started to gut the innards of her kitchen cabinets. Some have not been emptied since the eighties and we have been preparing for our very first yard sale. We have three piles: keep, donate, sell. The fruits of our labor are not being distributed evenly nor efficiently; she is choosing to keep everything. In a (frequent) moment of rage, she has demanded to keep a packet of seasoning that is dated over thirty years. It has caused a fiery disagreement. Nothing expires in this house. Seasoning, canned goods, grudges. Here, we hold onto things; letting go makes you wasteful, letting go makes you flighty.

Amidst this dusty purge we’ve discovered fossils from my grandfather; buried under years and years of avoidance. Knives and kitchen gadgets he made from the antlers of the deer he hunted, peppers he jarred, jokes he wrote. There are many things in this house I am happy to be finding, however, it is clear to me why they are at the bottoms of these piles, ignoring your pain has always been best practice.

My grandmother is most likely at the laundromat, which means I have some time. Bobby, a regular like her, told me it was her Cheers. I laughed to myself at the accuracy of this thought. She rings up bottomless tabs for plastic laundry bags and is always doing wash in the “attendants only” machines. If I can’t find her, (this is common,) all I need to do is call Claire to confirm she’s waiting on her last load to dry. Just yesterday, she skirted past the 4:00 P.M last call and was allowed to do wash at 4:30. I had sunk to sadness when I pictured a time when she won’t be parked in their parking lot, when she wouldn’t come home with the brightest whites and pairs of underwear folded as if they were to be set out to serve. I thought of the void that would enter that small little laundromat on the day we lose her. Morbid it seems, though I’ve done this quite a bit on this trip, foresee the time when the woman who raised me will not be to set my patience aflame. Time is a sweet though very fleeting concept.

In this moment alone I’ve decided to take a walk out back to my grandfather’s workshop; the workshop he would once butcher meat and make wine in. The place he’d build tables or cabinets in. Like him, it was once robust and reliable, though it has grayed and weakened with age. To the left of the face of the shop there is an old pear tree, my grandmother says it still bears fruit. It is hard to imagine that it could, it looks lanky and lean and infertile, though, her native tongue is that of this property and I am learning not to question her. I wonder about this tree’s memories, if it has ever missed my grandfather when he stopped walking past it. If it missed me running blindly through its surrounding grass to push open the gate. If it misses my pet bunny that lived to its left. If it can feel now, like me, that something has indeed changed. I think of my grandmother who has stood here all these years alongside it, absorbing her life as it passes, solid as a tree. Looking at a place that love once occupied and no longer does. I wonder what that does to a person and how we’re all supposed to keep going after loss. How has she kept going?

I remember standing at my grandfather’s feet inside this workshop, looking up at him as though he were Zeus; un-earthly, masculine, able to weld metal with lightning from the heavens. His loss was loud, and it sent tremors through this home. It was as if he was the rope that held onto the anchor; when he died, this family floated adrift and some of the sailors jumped ship. I picture the inside of my grandmother’s house and the memories she has buried deep inside its ocean. Too many years have passed, I’m not sure I can pull her back to shore, but I am here to try.

Speaking of, she has just pulled back into the driveway, the car is not even in park yet and we have things to do. It is time to wake up from my nostalgia and end this inner dialogue. Stillness and reflection are saved for the spoiled. So, we will go back to work now. Rummaging and re-arranging, burying and uncovering. We’ll spend the afternoon dancing around piles of cookbooks and God knows what else. Perhaps I can exercise the understanding I’ve just come to realize. I remind myself that there is treasure underneath all of this; though it is not perfect, it is real and for that alone, I have something to be thankful for.