Vibrant Village ™

My Grandmother's back door

I’ve thought a lot about memories since I moved back to my home, to this small town.

I realize now that coming home has given me a chance to do something I had longed to do, but had no time or room for--I need to burrow into my memories; to really explore their richness and to let them take me where they lead. Those powerful moments, unexplained and unimportant to anyone but me, that, even today, can stop me in my tracks.

As most of us have experienced, smells can call up memories instantaneously. There’s a scientific reason for this, but that’s not important.  What is important is that when I open the door to my grandparents' small white house out in the country here, I walk into a cacophony of smells that bring back multiple childhood memories.

There’s a faint scent of oil that makes me remember the huge oil-burning black iron stove that took up half the living room. From my young-child vantage point, it was both a scary monster with its licking flames barely contained behind the heavy metal door, but also a good thing because it kept us all warm on bitter winter nights.

In the kitchen, I open the upright metal cupboard and run my fingers around the green cups and saucers that my grandmother got with green stamps she carefully collected and pasted into little booklets.

The cabinet interior, with its peeling shelf paper, has a specific but indescribable smell that makes me think of my grandmother. My grandmother, with her long gray hair always bobby-pinned carefully to her head, making ice tea in big pitchers that she set out to sweat on the counters.

I remember her mixing and kneading dough for our wonderful Sunday dinner biscuits, even when her hands, with their swollen arthritic knuckles, must have pained her terribly.  Those same hands that carefully pulled strawberries from the small patch in her backyard while I tried, with my much smaller hands, to treat the berries as carefully as she did.

From those early days in my grandmother’s back yard, I moved into my later childhood when I would go with my own Mother and sometimes my Aunt, this grandmother’s daughters, in the already-hot early mornings of May to pick strawberries in cultivated fields.  The warm scent of the rich, black earth and the tear drops of dew on the green leaves, soon to disappear when the sun rose just a little higher.

More recently, when my own son was about five years old, he and I joined my Aunt, then in her 70s, at Simpson’s strawberry farm.  My Aunt scuttled down each row, filling bucket after bucket with ripe, red berries while my son and I lagged behind, trying to keep pace—and not succeeding.

I think about how strong my Aunt and my Mother both are—and how strong my grandmother was. They are role models for me, each of them in their own way.

My Grandmother died many years ago. But I know that all I need to do is open the back-porch screen door and step across the weathered threshold of that little white house, and the memories will flood over me, taking me to the places of my childhood. Bringing back to me a time and place that, for a long time, felt so very far away.