Remembering Something That Doesn’t Exist Anymore
by Elizabeth Gee
My grandparents lived in a single-story brick house that they built in the fifties. It was the same house my mother grew up in, with the same wallpaper and doorknobs and dishware and jars of emergency water in case of nuclear attack leftover from the Cold War. The basement looked like a seventies shrine, with faded orange carpeting and a broken record player. The house wasn’t out of place in their little Central Pennsylvania town; both stubbornly remained unchanged through the years. Even as new buildings were built and old ones came down, everything still had a sense of age, like the entire town was aching. Visiting my grandparents always felt stepping into a different time; once we pulled off I-80, we were thirty years in the past. There’s something eerily fictional about the place, like its caricature of a small town. The muddy river with a bank swarming with ducks; our family friend’s mechanic shop; the church where my grandmother taught Sunday school; the middle school across the street from the house; the train tracks that go nowhere; the specter of the highway edging along the town, promising an escape just out of a reach.
In the winter we always visited just after Christmas when everything was covered in a thin layer of slush. We crowded into the wallpapered living room where presents would be exchanged and carols sung. In the summer, everything smelled like wildflowers, and we ate special-family-recipe chicken and teaberry ice cream in the backyard with my grandpa’s carefully tended tomato plants. I picked up fallen black walnuts, presenting them to my grandpa for one penny a piece—the same rate that my mom received when she was a kid; walnut collecting fees did not reflect inflation.
With my mother’s family, every meal was an event. Usually, the table was only set for four, but when the whole family was there—my grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts and uncles—they added a leaf to the table and dragged every available chair into the kitchen. Grandmother sat at one end and Grandpa at the other, in a never changing pattern of a long-practiced routine.
Lunch was always sandwiches. Cold cuts and BLTs and corn on the cob and BBQ Middleswarth chips and leftovers from the night before. Grandmother made her sandwich the same way every time: one piece of white bread, Lebanon bologna, and mustard. Then she would cut the bread in half and fold it, making one piece of bread into the perfect sandwich. Before the meal was done, we were already discussing the next—which items needed to be pulled from the freezer and which needed to roast for hours and which should be chopped first.
For Christmas dinner we would have turkey or a roast; the real reason we were all there was dessert. Millions of types of cookies that no one as ever heard of. Fudge bottoms, butter cookies, zebra fudge, chess pies, and—my favorite—sand tarts, paper thin cookies decorated with sprinkles. Making them required a delicate balance of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs—a meticulously timed rest in the refrigerator—and hours of working at a rolling pin until the dough was so thin you could read through it. My grandpa would put the bowl of sand tarts directly on his plate, eating them mindlessly like potato chips. Try as they might, no one could make them like my grandmother, until I did.
The kitchen was Grandmother’s kingdom. She directed it like the conductor of a great orchestra, chattering orders from the kitchen rocking chair while my mother and aunts flurried around. Now she lives on in discolored recipe cards and crumpled notebooks pages with decades-old stains of unknown origins. Her words are imprecise and vague, only written down for her daughters’ benefit because she rarely needed a reference for a recipe. Each lived flawlessly in her impeccable mind—the mind that taught High School English for twenty years and never once lost at Scrabble.
I knew my grandpa best in the living room. His chair sat between the long front window and a table piled high with books and newspapers. At the 3 o’clock each day, he wandered into the kitchen to make himself a Jim Beam—a shot of Jim Beam whiskey, utterly unpalatable for the average person, and as much water as needed to fill up the glass. Jim Beam in hand, he talked about moments when his life intersected with the chapters in my history books. A Depression-era childhood and a stint in the Western Theater, going to college on the GI Bill and listening to Nixon resign on the radio—he was born when Coolidge was president. His stories of World War II made him shiver, like some part of him was still in a foxhole in the Ardennes, watching the snow fall and freezing his toes off, writing love letters to my grandmother and fingering music on an imaginary flute.
Sometimes time slips through our fingers, like you can’t get a good grip on it. Sometimes it seems uncomfortably tangible, like you can feel the lines deepening across your face. Sometimes it feels like a cosmic mistake, like you’re not actually twenty-two but someone forgot to carry the one and a few years accidentally slipped in there somewhere. I have found that grandparents bend the space-time continuum a bit. To them you’re always seven, but your mother is perpetually twelve and some part of themselves is still eighteen and going off to war. The truth is (or maybe not, who knows) that all of this exists at once. The people you love are never really gone, because they are still a part of you.