Tattered Riches

The antique keyhole is hard to resist. Peering through, as if a portal to another time, my right eye adjusts to the dimness, swallowing the austere decrepitude of the baby blue foyer. I spy the yellowed edge of our Laidlaw coat of arms, framed in black wood. Gripping the smooth, age-burnished brass knob, I keep my eye to the hole, transfixed by dancing dust mites glittering in the dying sun’s rays cutting the small room into a pair of acute triangles.

I expect the door to heave off its hinges when I press my exhausted weight against it. Ancient oak, paint chipped in alabaster, it doesn’t budge.

I’ve dreamt of this cottage for decades. Years when my only solace was the magic imagined when, with eyes squeezed shut, I’d block out the cacophony of noise. Voices that screamed or wailed. Sometimes the voices whispered in the night of unfathomable things.

But the worst was the silence…

Crushing silence.

I haven’t been to this dilapidated cottage since I was twelve. It was different then… full of mirth and wonder. Cozy and full of antique quilts and tiny blue trinkets Gram collected over the years. She kept the fridge stocked with my favorites: fruity jellos molded into colorful stars and half-moons; ants on a log, ready for the picking. Crisp celery layered with creamy peanut butter and red currant ants, bursting juiciness in my small mouth. There was usually a cherry pie or pan of kuchen, cooling on the stove top, filling her small kitchen with aromas of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Most of my early childhood weekends were spent here, before I was sent away.

We spent hours collecting flowers and herbs, to place in mason jars around the place, bringing more sunlight and joy inside. She cared for me like no one else… allowing me to be my own wild self. No itchy stockings or pressed dresses. I’d arrive in some fancy number, picked by my mother at the Higbee’s department store, with strict instructions not to muss it up. Gram was a seamstress, could sew just about anything. She made me cut-offs and dungarees so I could scramble around in her untamed backyard, unhindered.

Now as I stand outside the old place, I’m lost. I miss hot summers of grass tickling my legs, dodging swarms of Canadian soldiers and gnats or stretched out on Gram’s sleeping porch as a breeze blew in off Lake Erie. I miss the chaos of her dining table: scattered scraps of assorted fabrics and clumps of dried flowers saved for making Christmas cards. And stacks of Highlights Magazine she kept just for me.

She let me create with her: sewing, baking, collecting… whatever I wanted. She never made fun of my stutter. Just waited patiently until the words tumbled out, scattered and discombobulated. No reprimands I wasn’t doing things correctly. No vocabulary lessons or math cards. Maybe the occasional admonition to watch the hot stove top or to eat my popsicle slower to avoid brain freeze. She let me figure things out on my own, teaching me to remove splinters from my feet from the raggedy porch steps. She let me bring in injured baby birds and other critters without a fuss. When they’d die, she’d cry with me and help me bury them in the way back of her yard, erecting small memorials.

Gram passed away last week. Ninety-three years young but she aged rapidly after being moved to the nursing home, a couple months before. I hadn’t been to see her. I allowed too much time to go by. We’d talk on the phone, but her weakening voice put me in a state of despair.

She wanted to stay in her home… the one she built with her husband, made of red bricks with green flower boxes. Mother and Aunt Suse insisted she move to a more suitable place: Harmony Elms Living Lodge, aka HELL, known for their memory care unit. There was nothing wrong with Gram’s memory. Mother worried she’d forget to turn off the stove or take a tumble down the stairs. Instead she died in HELL.

I should have come back but I didn’t. Life took me in a different direction.

She died before Mother and Aunt Suse got the cottage cleaned out and sold. I was up to my elbows in redtail feathers, working to splint a broken wing when I got the call.

I cratered. Flashes to an earlier time… time I’ll never get back. The next day I was on a plane, touching down in a place I swore never to return to. I begged to clean out the cottage. It’s the least I could do after abandoning her.

This cottage was my haven for a time, full of magic and genies and ghosts. I held on to those entities after being sent to “special” school. At night, curled on a lumpy mattress, I’d tune out the racket of the other girls. I’d close my eyes and imagine myself peering through Gram’s keyhole back into a world that made sense: a world of butterflies and worn, threadbare quilts tucked around me as I’d snooze on her sleeping porch. The smell of baking yeast and dusty rose eau de toilette filled me with a longing hard to bear. Crushing my eyes closed, I’d conjure her: moss green, tattered cardigan and curly gray hair a wild halo around her impish face, piercing eyes, purple opalescent. Eyes that could see through me but never probed.

And her laugh… She brought fairy tales to life, acting out the roles of my favorite characters. She wasn’t overly touchy. A gentle hand on my shoulder or a pat on the head, calmed me, the same way holding a wild hare could.

Sometimes I’d catch her crying… talking to herself… or her ghosts. Her tears were silent… a release or relief. I couldn’t understand it then, but looking back now… I think she mourned a life she no longer needed to hide from.

I never knew my grandfather. He died a month before I was born. But I’d heard tales over the years. Volatile and angry one moment… charming and dashing the next. There wasn’t a single picture of the man in her home. You’d think there might be one lying about. There wasn’t. I heard she refused to attend his funeral.

Now the old cottage sits quiet, waiting for me to wade through her things.

On the old, weathered stoop, I peer into the keyhole of her front door once again, just as I’d imagined years ago when a lonely, troubled girl, kept hope alive in the imaginings of her Gram and her enchanted cottage.

I smell her… hints of cinnamon and the floral, linty dust of her old, shabby cardigan.

I’d give anything to wrap up in that tattered old thing again.