flashquake Editor's Picks flashquake I liked this creative nonfiction piece. I think it speaks to most things we take for granted when growing up but have a lasting, nostalgic hold on us. This one really did the trick. |
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They burned my grandmother's house today.
Life has taken me beyond the bounds of that small town and its surrounding farms, and three hundred miles was too many to drive for such a little thing. So I wasn't there when they waded through overgrown iris and rampant four o'clocks and stuck kindling into the foundation. I wasn't there when flames licked through the kitchen where Grandma taught me to bake, with the thub thub thub of the sifter steady as a heartbeat beneath our voices. Where Grandpa shared with me the joys of grape jelly sandwiches. Where Easters and Thanksgivings and Christmases served up a steady feast of aunts and uncles, laughter and tears. I wasn't there when smoke poured up the stairs and into the room where the old oak, its own battle with time long lost, had sung lullabies to sleepyheads, where feather pillows had cradled dreams of growing up until odors of bacon and oatmeal teased us back into the light of day. I wasn't there when the physical evidence of my childhood crashed into the brick-cool cellar where Grandma had washed clothes and Grandpa had scrubbed for lunch, even though black earth was embedded permanently in the creases of his hands. Burning is a chemical reaction, I learned in some long-ago classroom. The fire consumes its fuel, changes it, leaves it as something other than what it was, something that can never take back its old state. But it doesn't destroy. What was, still is, merely in an altered form. It goes on. It becomes part of something new. I wasn't there when they burned my grandparents' house. I watched my boys make mud in the sand, listened to their shrieking laughter, planted four o'clocks. I rake my fingers through the loose dirt and black seeds, working them just deep enough that they'll take, not so deep that they'll rot. The dirt forms a fine black line under my nails. The towering pines whisper an afternoon lullaby. "Hungry, Mom!" my boys shout as they run toward me. "Jelly sandwiches!" yells the oldest. And I'm glad I'm here, to see the youthful joy and love of life burning in my son's eyes. |
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My grandfather died in 1986. Grandma moved into an apartment in town and hasn't lived on the farm since. She rented the place out for a year or two, but for most of those years, the old farmhouse stood empty. And for most of those years, she's been saying she needs to do something about that old, falling-down place. Today, she did.