Tag Archives: grandparents

Marshlands

Posted on by under Guest, Time & Place

As a kid, I always thought it was odd that my grandparent’s house had its own name.

When my siblings and I piled into mom’s red minivan to drive the five winding hours to the South Carolina Lowcountry, we weren’t just headed to “Mimi and Pop’s house”—we were bound for the oyster-shell driveway of “Marshlands.”

Marshlands (1)Marshlands dripped with history. Huge oak trees, strung with Spanish moss, seemed to have been rooted in the front yard since Earth’s creation. A plaque on the ivy-draped front gates declared the house a National Historic Landmark due to its early 1800s construction and its use as a hospital during the Civil War.

Inside, among antique furniture and fraying Turkish rugs, I found artifacts of more recent, familial history—pictures of my parents smiling on their wedding day, newspaper clippings about Mimi’s real estate business and Pop’s run for lieutenant governor, photo albums of my older cousins as toddlers, always at least one caught red-faced and wailing in the camera flash. Pop’s reluctance to throw anything away (a tendency born from his depression-era childhood, perhaps) even made the fridge an excavation site for expiration dates gone by.

To me, the exact dates and details of Marshlands’ past didn’t seem especially relevant. But the house’s musty oldness—hinting at stories of antebellum balls, of wounded soldiers, of my mother’s teenage years—added to my certainty that Marshlands was magical. It seemed like the kind of house where all the stories I read started. Surely I would find a hidden room if I just pushed some hidden knob on the fireplace or tugged on the right dusty, leather-bound book on the shelves lining the study. I knew the massive wardrobe upstairs would lead me to Narnia, though I was too intimidated to get close enough to pass through. The giant vase in the back yard (an actual relic from the filming of The Jungle Book in the nearby Sea Islands) sent shivers down my spine in the best possible way, as I envisioned the cursed rubies and gold coins that must lie at the bottom.

Marshlands had its own sort of everyday magic, too, in the way that only familiar childhood places away from home can. Much of that magic came from Mimi, who was unfailingly gorgeous and refined with her red lipstick, perfect makeup, and elegant Southern accent. She served us lemonade and iced tea on the porch, taught us to play rummy, and took us to Boombears, the nearby toy shop that (coincidentally?) went out of business shortly after Mimi’s 18 grandkids passed the age of Beanie Babies obsessions.

Even after Mimi got sick, some of the childhood magic of Marshlands lingered. My siblings and I still climbed on the low-hanging branches of the oak trees and bounced on the trampoline with rusty springs. Mimi still served lemonade and rum cake (with increasing portions of rum as her eyesight dwindled). Pop still snored in front of TV college football, and woke up to protest when anyone changed the channel.

But when we left, my mom would cry—not “sad to leave” kind of tears, but tears of a sort of loss I couldn’t quite understand. I was a preteen who had never watched someone close to me slowly slip away.

After Mimi fell and broke her wrist, my mom and her siblings decided to move Mimi and Pop to a one-story house in my uncle’s neighborhood. They rented out Marshlands to strangers for a few years.

The next time I went into Marshlands was for the luncheon after Mimi’s funeral. Nothing had changed—and everything had changed. The gold-patterned wallpaper remained. The old books. The dust and faintly musty smell. But the house’s magic was harder to find. In the years since I’d been in the house, I’d gone off to college and started paying my own bills. I’d forgotten the rules for rummy. I’d realized that the wardrobe upstairs only held mothballs and fur coats.

After cleaning up from the luncheon, my cousins and I climbed into the attic and tried on Mimi’s old ballgowns. We each took a few pieces of jewelry. One cousin pocketed Mimi’s iconic red lipstick.

A few years later, we celebrated that same cousin’s wedding on Marshlands’ lawn. We watched her walk down the aisle between the oak trees we’d climbed as kids, then sipped champagne under the huge reception tent that had temporarily displaced the rusty-springed trampoline. Pop joined us on the dance floor for a shuffling Carolina swing, taking my cousin by the hand as the band played “My Girl.” Just before the newlyweds drove off in Pop’s antique car, we all lit lanterns that sailed past the trees and over the house’s red roof, creating a new kind of magic.

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photo (1)Dargan Thompson is a freelance writer and editor based in Orlando, Florida. Other than one glorious semester studying abroad in London, she has always lived in Florida, and she finds the Orlando airport quite accommodating for her frequent travels. Find her online at darganthompson.com or on Twitter @darganthompson.

Waking Up

Posted on by under Sound & Place

I am three, and I’m waking up from my afternoon nap in the right way: Slowly. Contentedly. In my own time and space.

I’m in no hurry to open my eyes. The bedroom is dim from the pulled curtains, anyway, and I’ve memorized every sight I would see from my place on the bottom bunk.

6259167128_a64b881939_bAn airplane flies overhead. In our house, below a well-traveled flight path to the airport, it’s a sound as common as a truck roaring by on our busy inner-city street. Whenever the house is quiet and I’m quiet, it seems there’s the sound of a plane somewhere in the sky.

The window is open in the bedroom I share with my brother, who, at almost-six, is too old for naps. I can hear the neighborhood kids playing outside. Laughter and shrieking, then protests, complaints.

Now the sound of a hose as more water is added to the plastic wading pool in the yard next door. I can picture the blue pool, the grass clippings floating on the glistening water.

There’s the voice of the bossiest girl, who is not the oldest but is the most sure of what she wants and how to get it. Just the tone of her voice conjures a snapshot of her hands on her hips, one hip jutted out to the side.  

My eyes are awake now, primed by scenes my ears have fashioned. I get up, my pigtails lopsided from their time on the pillow, and leave my bottom bunk to follow the sound of humming to my mother.

*    *    *    *    *

We lived on the ground floor of the house on Walnut Street until I was five. It was my first home. There are photographs to inform my visual sense of that place, but I can’t really claim them as memories. What I truly remember, from deep in some audio file my mind, are sounds.

Like the sound of my mom humming.

Our living space was small, making it easy for sounds to travel from one room to the next. My mom loves silence, but sometimes I think she loves it because it’s like a blank canvas—an open space for her to hum or whistle into as she folds laundry or chops vegetables. In the house on Walnut Street, her humming was my homing beacon as I navigated the waters between independence and security.

Sometimes upon waking from a nap I could hear my grandmother’s musical voice coming from the kitchen—a one-way, joyful conversation that meant an “audio letter” had arrived in that day’s mail. With my grandparents far away in California and long distance phone rates too costly for either household’s budget, my mom and grandma regularly recorded newsy updates on small, table-top cassette players. The tapes were mailed back and forth in padded manila envelopes.

If Mom was recording a letter to Grandma rather than listening to one, she would announce my appearance into the small microphone, inviting me to talk. “Oh, here’s Krissy! She just woke up from her nap. Krissy, say hi to Grandma and Grandpa! Tell them what kind of cookies we baked this morning.”

My dad’s arrival home each evening was inevitably announced through the stereo speakers: the pop-and-crackle of the needle touching an album. When Dad was home, there was always music playing. Aaron Copeland, Miles Davis, Stephen Sondheim, Bela Bartok, the Beatles, Peter, Paul & Mary—their electrifying, silky, surprising, earthy, and complex notes were the soundtrack of my childhood (the volume always a bit too high for my mom’s taste).

During warmer months, the sounds in our home mingled with the sounds of the world outside. In 1970s Michigan, no one had air conditioning—certainly not those of us renting old houses divided into duplexes in the city’s core. We opened windows, turned on noisy box fans, and spent as much time as possible playing outside with water, or sitting on shady stoops. Private lives were aired to the neighborhood: Everyone’s music and arguments, their clattering pots and pans and crying babies, were heard alongside the passing boom of car stereos, loud mufflers, and barking dogs.

After being tucked into my bottom bunk each night, the sounds of Walnut Street played on, each sound telling me a story. Some were as comforting and present as the hum of my mom’s sewing machine on the kitchen table; others were as mysterious and distant as another plane in the night sky, its seats filled with strangers traveling who knows where. 

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Kristin bio YAH

Visiting With Ghosts

Posted on by under Losing Place

About once a month, I wish that I could revisit a place from my past. It’s not always the same place (though some are recurring), but my terms are always the same: I want to be alone and undisturbed. I want to be able to look around to my heart’s content, and I want it to be exactly as it was when I was there.

I’m not sure what I think this would solve, exactly. I’m not sure what I would gain by sitting again at the bar of a restaurant, closed for the season, where I ate several breakfasts and dinners with a boy I once knew, who worked there when it was open. I remember the way he made coffee with a practiced, professional hand, and how we cooked together in the industrial kitchen in bare feet.

I spent one day there, alone, meeting food writing deadlines. Autumn sun flooded the floor where tables and chairs usually would have been. If I close my eyes, I can still remember how strange it was to be in a restaurant which wasn’t fulfilling its purpose, as if I were living in a post-rapture world and businesses were no longer relevant.

When that boy moved out of the country a few weeks later, he took the keys to that restaurant with him. I know that if I were to go back, it would not be to the same place where we danced to “Summertime Sadness” in the dark, or watched “You’ve Got Mail” together on Halloween. “That’s my favorite movie,” he had told me. I believed him.

Then, there’s a triplex in a small college town south of Spokane where my ex-boyfriend used to live. Floaty, grey sheers hung on his windows and the frozen early spring light filtered in during the day as I sat on the couch. Sometimes I would drive the hour and a half to spend a day off with him; we would sit together, enjoying our closeness. On those visits, I would arrive before he finished with work. He left the door unlocked for me, and I would lock it behind me immediately, the difference between my San Diego upbringing and his in rural Idaho.

From his window, I could see the local grocery store. Sometimes I would walk over and buy vegetables or salad dressing. He always had plenty of frozen things, chicken, beef, and vegetables, but I was the one who bought and roasted asparagus, quartered brussels sprouts, or sautéed mushrooms in butter.

I spent many hours in that three story house waiting for him to get home. I’m not sure why it still haunts me. In the afternoons there was a silence about it that reminded me of nap times when I used to babysit. I kept an ear out the way I listened for a child who might be stirring. I watched out the window for his return, tuning my ear to the sound of his truck.

Most often though, I find myself mentally walking the halls of my mother’s mother’s house, the one she sold quite a few years ago. Before I even get inside, there is the fragrance of gardenia along the path. There is a bush where I hid a Lindt truffle from my grandmother’s jar, hoping that it would be there for my next visit (it wasn’t). The lawn is split into two levels by a rock wall where we sat to let our sparklers burn out safely every fourth of July.

Inside, I step carefully into the marble-floored entry, remembering how hard it could be in an unexpected fall. I pause in the living room for a moment, remembering the year all of my cousins got gymnastics Barbies and we twirled them all over that floor. Upstairs, I run straight to the Tulip room, so named for my grandmother’s favorite flower and all of the tulip decor, mostly pink. This was where I slept when I visited and where she kept all the toys.

Across the way is the yellow bathroom where I steeped in oatmeal baths during my chicken pox and brushed my teeth with bright blue bath salts the color of my Crest gel.

Downstairs there is a den, beneath the kitchen where the food rested expectantly on holidays, ready to be heaped onto plates. I can’t quite remember how it worked, but I know that there was a bar. That was where my grandparents kept the biscuits for Jebby, their faithful dog, who patiently accepted one from each of the six grandchildren.

That den was where my Poppa, my mom’s dad, introduced me to Indiana Jones and Star Wars in those tender years we shared before he passed away, followed soon after by Jebby. If I pause in this section of the house and squeeze my eyes tight, I can hear the splashes from the waterslide into the pool just through the sliding glass door, and the echoes of a hollow ball meeting paddles and a table, down the hall in the garage where the coordinated are playing ping pong. Any moment now my Poppa will wrap an arm around my shoulder and ask if he can make me a drink. I guess, maybe, when I revisit a place, I don’t always want to be alone.  

Scents of Summer

Posted on by under Scent & Place

“Watch out for the cow piles,” my grandmother said as we headed to the barn for milking. I skipped behind her, hopping over and around the cows’ contributions to the fertilization of the earth. Even a smidgen of one of these smelly deposits on my shoe would necessitate a thorough scrubbing to remove the odor.

Nannie stepped briskly in her black rubber boots, leaning forward with her bonneted head two feet in front of her body. Two wooden telephone poles, lying flat and butted up against one anotherFullSizeRender(27), formed a bridge across the creek. A thick wire was attached to the trunk of a tree on each side of the creek to grab hold to as we walked across.

Nannie made short work of walking the telephone poles, without using the wire, and continued the trek to the barn. I pulled up short, clinched my teeth, clutched the wiry life-line, lifted one red, dirt-stained sneaker, and stepped on one of the poles.

On the opposite bank, Nannie must have smelled my fear because she turned and coaxed me across in her low, comforting voice. “Don’t look down.”

I looked down. The crawdads were having a party in the water below, skimming and swirling along the silty bottom. Lazy leaves floated like tiny, green boats. It seemed miles lay between my feet and the life of the creek.

I sat down. Relief slowed my breathing. I sucked in air, exhaled, and began vigorously chewing the petrified piece of Juicy Fruit gum tucked in the back of my mouth.

Splinters posed a hazard to my palms and tender behind, yet I chose to scoot across. I pressed my palms and lifted my bottom, inching across until my fingers squeezed Nannie’s outstretched hand. I fell into the folds of her faded, calico work-dress, breathing in the fresh scent of washing powers. Together we walked to the musty barn where Granddad already had the cows attached to their milking machines.

My assignment was to stand sentry beside a large plastic bucket and shovel, its blade as wide as a toilet seat. Cows warned of impending bowel action by raising their tails. I watched. At the ready. Tails twitched. Lifted. Action! I moved with the shovel; the heft of it almost pulled my slight, eight-year-old body down. Granddad joined me. Leaning over, his hands gripped the handle above mine; we joined forces to catch the imminent splat.

The deadly odor of the thick, greenish-black ooze, coupled with the straw-dust tickling my nose, provoked a fit of spasmodic coughing and laughing. Delivered of her load, the cow mooed. I mooed back.

We maintained distance between excrement, barn floor, and milking machine. Teats—freed from the suction cups attached to them—dangled from udders, no longer swollen. I looked on as Nannie and Granddad poured the creamy milk from clean buckets into tall galvanized cans.

Granddad released the cows from their individual stalls and gave a holler to the line of bovine. They filed to the pasture to laze in the shade and chew on sweet-smelling grass.

***

Laundry was done once a week—more often during stifling Southern summers—after early morning chores. Soil, sour sweat, and animal smells wove into the fabric of garments, socks, bandanas, towels, and washcloths. Nannie’s washing machine was an old-fashioned vessel, large and round, situated in the center of her small, screened in back porch. I imagined it as a tub in which cartoon characters were riding the rapids.

Nannie fed sopping wet laundry through a wringer between two rollers that pressed out the water. With my bare feet planted on the smooth stone floor, I caught flattened pieces as they came through and tossed them in a basket. Nannie toted, I followed and watched as she pinned a parade of color to the clothesline.

***

Nannie ran a bath for me at bedtime. Splashing in the tub, I created an ocean of bubbles with a slippery bar of ZEST soap. Capturing it in my washcloth, I gave myself a vigorous scrub from head to toe, then grabbed the stopper’s shiny beaded pull and watched as dirty, brown water swirled down the drain, exiting with a loud gurgle.

Days lingered long those summers. Friday evenings, Granddad reclined in his easy chair and listened to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, while rubbing his sore hands with Cornhusker’s Lotion. As strains of Bill Monroe’s fiddle drifted into my bedroom, I grew drowsy and snuggled under the sun-kissed sheets. Nannie’s moonflowers hugged clapboard along the side of the house. Blossoms opened large in the lunar light, offering their incense as a benediction to the day.

Scan 3Nannie and Granddad’s barn—worn by disuse and time— photographed in 1984 by my mother. 

Photo (above right)

Nannie’s Bonnet

 

 

If You Pass the Elephant, You’ve Gone Too Far

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

My grandparents are gone, the property’s sold, but the elephant abides.

In the 70s, my grandparents owned Taylors Furniture and Gifts, a small shop in a two-story building my grandfather built. Huge windows faced the highway. In good weather, Nana lined up rockers and swings out front.

I recently found a business card touting their Gifts, Wicker & Rattan Furniture, Rockers, Ladderback Chairs, Barrels, West Virginia Glass, and unspecified “Mexican Items.”

Mostly I remember the store through Nana’s left-behind collection of photographs and newspaper clippings.

And the artifacts (think wicker monkeys and Fostoria glass) that still circulate in the family.

And the elephant.

nicole mom pink elephantPapa Taylor bought a pink elephant statue in Michigan, an animal nearly ten feet high to the top of his regal fiberglass head. Papa brought it back to West Virginia and parked it in the small square of lawn in front of the store. He faced that elephant toward U.S. Route 60, a busy two-lane then that’s swelled to four plus a turning lane now. The animal’s uplifted trunk curls behind him, as if to spray his dusty back, his riders, or the store with imaginary water.

Papa gambled that such an unexpected creature would make people stop for a photo, and then stick around to buy a fetching coffee table or a trash can shaped like a frog.The pink elephant is the spirit animal of that stretch of highway lined with grocery stores, car lots, pawn shops, strip malls, and fast food restaurants. On a nicer road, the elephant would be an eyesore. But there, he blends right in, an eccentric neighbor who causes a double take before he wins you over. He’s a non-native species that’s an emblem of our small town.

Papa and Nana printed the pink elephant on their business checks and collected pink elephant knickknacks in the house. For years after my grandfather died, my mom would find a token pink elephant for Nana at Christmas: a pendant, a statue, a tea towel. In the last days of her life, as she lay in bed in hospice, Nana slept with a plush pink elephant tucked under one arm.

My grandparents lived near the store, in the last house that Papa ever built, a split-level perched above the highway. We lived on a road down the hill from them, a road that Nana called a “holler,” as in “how are things up the holler?”

Our holler was close, claustrophobic, leafy in the summer, a handy place to store your shadows. In a holler, you’re tucked into the hills and most of the mailboxes bear the same last name.  You learn not to look at the Christmas lights unless you’re in the passenger seat. You learn the curves and gamble sometimes on what’s around the bend. Could be fog, could be wind, could be nothing.

The pink elephant was a handy landmark so friends and pizza delivery people could find us. We weren’t far from Rt. 60, but you had to know where turn. The holler didn’t draw attention to itself which was part of its charm.

Now I live in the Pacific Northwest, far from my native holler and its attending elephant.  With no tattoos, I feel a bit naked in this part of the world. I’ve thought about getting one of a stylized pink elephant, an elephant as it might look if it sauntered out of illuminated manuscript or a cathedral window. The ink would mark where I’m from.

“What does it mean?” People always ask that about tattoos. I could say that it represents that tall, hollow elephant on Rt. 60. It reminds me of grown-ups climbing ladders and hoisting up grandchildren to sit on the elephant for photos because it’s our birthright.

I could remind them that the pink elephant means starry visions when you’re in an altered state.

Pink elephants, the internet assures me, do exist. Behold the albino elephant, available in white or pink. And, affirms the internet, the pink elephant stands for what a charmed childhood and a badass tattoo must always be: “something extraordinary.”

more walk w virginia

Nicole’s work has appeared in Image, Mid-American Review, Hotel Amerika, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, The Ocean State Review, Western Humanities Review, Tampa Review, Quarterly West, North Dakota Quarterly, and in Permanent Vacation (Bona Fide Books, 2011) and Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical (Cascade Press, 2009) and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, and the web editor for Rock & Sling and How to Pack for Church Camp, an online anthology of creative nonfiction about summer camp.  She is on the Twitters at @heynicolesheets.

 

The Sunshine State

Posted on by under Guest, Season & Place

Florida has two seasons: summer and January. And flip flops can (and should) be worn during both.

Cradled between the Atlantic Ocean and its more laidback cousin, the Gulf of Mexico, it quietly putters along while the states above it tromp through seasons and mark time in the usual fashion. Like Peter Pan’s Neverland, Florida is a green, sun-soaked playground where April is indistinguishable from October and a staggering array of flowers blossom year-round between gumbo-limbo trees and cabbage palms.

Jax BeachTo a nine-year-old child like me, born in the grubby northeast corner of Arkansas, Florida was a revelation—a land of limitless azure skies filled with cotton candy clouds and a salt-tinged breeze. I spent days hunting for sharks’ teeth at Venice Beach, trail riding through acres of slash pines and saw palmettos (always on the lookout for fat yellow spiders), tubing the Ichetucknee River, and prospecting for balls in the water hazards that dotted the state’s ubiquitous manicured golf courses.

Though I grew up, the landscape changed much more gradually than I did. Sadly, once empty property is now filled with the ubiquitous, inescapable trappings of modern society—chain restaurants and grocery stores. Gas stations and home improvement warehouses. A Starbucks on every corner. But my elementary school, the place where I learned about Seminole Indians and fell in love with C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, is still there, a larger parking lot and bike corral its only signs of growth.

My grandparents’ home is still there too, a two-story structure of weatherworn bricks surrounded by a sun-bleached and slightly warped wooden fence. It’s the place where I perfected my backstroke in their kidney-shaped pool and lazed away the afternoon on a lounge chair, a bowl of Schwann’s rocky road ice cream in my lap. The place where we celebrated countless Christmases and birthdays and where my aunt and uncle—and later my husband and I—were wed by my great uncle James in front of the coquina fireplace in the living room.

In a state where the Fountain of Youth burbles away, The Mouse still turns a brisk trade in his Magic Kingdom, and the seasons never change, it’s all too easy to forget that time isn’t a renewable resource and that, for everyone who lives there, it will eventually run out.

Between the home I love and the school I remember is a small structure—one that has served both as a law office and a police sub-station. But it is now an assisted living facility for people who have dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, and my grandfather is one of the people who calls it home.

Like the beach he once enjoyed, which is siphoned grain by grain back into the sea, he is being pulled away from us by the tide of time. And there is no regaining what has been eroded, no reclamation project that can bring him back. It’s a hard truth to witness in a place filled with the delightful lie of endless sunshine.

I now live in Georgia and experience the passing of time as others do—season by season. Summer lingers longer here than it does most places, and autumn is far shorter than I’d like. There is winter too, a span of months where leaves wither and fall into doleful piles, leaving their trees naked and exposed to the same cold winds that slice through my bones no matter how many layers of clothing I pile on.

But because I experience those bitter months, I’m all the more appreciative of the spring that is sure to follow. I want to cheer when the Japanese Red Maple in my front yard once again dons its ruby-colored cloak and my husband’s bees begin the work of restocking their hives. Witnessing it all has helped me accept that for everything there is indeed a season, a time for everything under heaven. What is born will die. What is planted will be plucked up. I will weep and mourn at times, yes, but I will also have cause laugh and dance again. And one day, I’ll live in a land that knows no seasons and where death no longer holds sway.

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Jamie A. Hughes“The Sunshine State” was written by Jamie A. Hughes. Jamie is a writer, editor, and unapologetic St. Louis Cardinals fanatic who currently lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband and two needy cats. A former high school teacher, she now works as the managing editor of In Touch Magazine and is struck dumb by her good fortune. She blogs at tousledapostle.com and can be found on Twitter @tousledapostle.