Monday Morning

La la, la la la...

Every Monday, my parents come to visit. They drive from my home town, which is about 40 minutes away. Monday mornings, I whisk through the apartment, dump laundry in our bedroom, clear the dining table and couch of books, make a path through the various wood puzzles for the door to open, and do what I can to make the bathroom and kitchen presentable. After this whirlwind of activity, the Impling and I set out for the playground, which is luckily only a block away.

There we settled into the swings, the slides, the climbing and running and spinning and jumping until the Impling spied my parents coming through the old iron gate. Then she made a beeline for Grandma to forage in the special yellow frog bag for Animal Crackers, and then to the swings, as she knew she had a tireless pusher in Grandpa.

We watched her play, and I talked with Mom...there were showers, and weddings to plan for, old friends who said hello, someone moved away, the oh, yes, the minister had his last Sunday sermon...We chat in the shade of the great oak tree that rises like a grandfather giant in the center of the playground. The tree is easily over a hundred years old. Boys and girls undoubtedly played with hoops and jacks around that tree once upon a time. The ghosts of those children seem to rustle a faint hello through the leaves.

An acquaintance I hadn't seen in some months showed up with her boy, she called a hello and was greeted by her play-date mom. The regulars settled into the morning...a patchwork of familiar nameless faces and familiar named ones. Strollers dotted the landscape. Lily sat on the bench by the sandboxes, Jeanna scooted around the sand-strewn paths on one of the park's toys. One toddler discovered the button for the fountain, and sprays of water arched in a sudden blast that startled the children who had innocently climbed into the dry space to retrieve toys that had migrated from the sandboxes.

Eventually, when the cookies vanished in a carnage of be-headings worthy of the French Revolution, we headed back to the apartment. Then Mom was dragged to the Impling's room to look at books, and I put water on for tea, and settled down at the table to chat with Dad.

Then the past and present came together as we spoke of gardens...the Impling's batch of marigolds began to form flower buds. Mom's tomato plant had yielded it's first tomato...she cut it up and ate it straight, no salt, no mayo. Two more were ripening on the vine.

Then came a seeming non sequitur. Dad had found a tape of an interview with an old lady I had known, and had spent many afternoons with as a teenager. She had suffered from scarlet fever as a child, and as a result, went blind. She lived, at the time I knew her, in a wonderful old stone cottage that was built over a river. There was actually a window in the floor where you could look down at the water rushing beneath you. It gave an extraordinary sensation that you were in motion, even though you stood still, watching the water flow under your sneakers. The river flowed out from under the stone cottage, and into a tiny ravine that was bordered on one side by a steep slope of ferns, aspen, birch and sugar maple, and on the other by a sidewalk and an old chain-link fence that was overgrown with Concord grape vines.

I remembered the smell of those grapes in the hot summers, and I remembered picking them as I walked by, biting through the tough skins to suck out the juice. The sidewalk was always stained with the discarded grape skins from other impromptu epicures who had passed by.

Dad went back further, to the old Victorian house where Nana once lived. There had once been an arbor covered with Concord grapes, he said. Nana had harvested them, crushed them in a large bin, then mixed the pulp with sugar and set it in a cheesecloth bag over another bin to drain. She collected all the juice, boiled it until it thickened, then filled her mason jars with grape jelly.

I barely remember that kitchen, if at all. I was all of 6 years old when we moved one town away to the north, and Nana moved (one town away to the south) into small house she could keep up with, but large enough for her two baby grand pianos and a good sized vegetable garden instead of a back yard. But I know the smell of those grapes, and the sun and the heat. I created memories I never had as I listened to my father go back in memory even further, to the garden of his grandmother, along with chickens, goats, and sheep that they kept for the wool. “She was the kind of woman who felt like she had to do it all” said Dad.

Now I remembered the smell of hot sheep and sun baked wool and hay from the 4-H fairs I wandered around in as a child. I know the smell of the farm from Sheep Pasture, and summer visits to a family farm in Maine. My father's grandmother looked to me like Nana. In my mind, my child-ghost was hovering around their kitchens, their parlours, their arbors, pastures and ravines. I watched with heart-full nostalgia women I never knew, and who never knew I would one day exist. I have nothing now from them but my father's memories, and the still, sure sense that right now, if I needed to, I could do it all.