The Land Mines At Grandma’s
I don’t make a habit of going over there anymore. It’s different than it used to be. The colorful floral wallpaper was long-ago painted over and replaced with a sterile blue paint that is far too reminiscent of any hospital in America. If you look closely enough, you can still see it on the edges of the wall, places where the paint missed, but you have to be very cognizant and aware of it’s existence prior to being blue-washed. All signs of life have been sucked out of the windows like an eternal tornado formed and sat still just outside of them. The photos on the walls are gone and only the imprints of them remain. Her collection of creepy dolls are boxed up and sitting in the dark of a musty basement, too new to be valuable and too creepy to be enjoyed by anybody other than my dead grandma.
In my mind, there is a fact that is indisputable. The soul of that home died with her and it’s never been the same since.
It’s hardly even a house today.
So I don’t go there very often. It bums me out too much. It forces me to confront the fact that she is no longer in it, neither the world or her kitchen. I would never get that sagely advice, never have potato soup again for as long as I live. It’s a very empty feeling and I don’t like to indulge myself in it unless I absolutely have to. But when I hear that my eighty-year-old grandfather is planning to move boxes by himself, it compels me to stop by and help him.
That’s why I went there today.
It’s become evident over the years that my grandfather kept that house in such pristine condition over the years for my grandmother and for her alone. In her absence, ever since her death in 2010, the effects have been stark and cumulative. It happens before I take a single step inside.
It was a yearly tradition for my grandfather to strip the paint from that homemade staircase. He would then replace it with any color that my grandma wanted. She usually settled on brown, but it was every shade of that color imaginable. Some years, the difference was so subtle that I couldn’t be convinced that it was different at all. He would then paint the awning and trim of the house to match the stairs (doubly confounding to me on the years that the color looked exactly the same as the year before). It was a long process that he started over again after the final frost of the year. I still remember watching him out there, steam rising from his back as he labored over the staircase with great affection. A man of few words, he showed his love for my grandmother by doing things for her. Things that he just didn’t have to do.
Things like painting and repainting that damn staircase every single year.
Today, the stairs are the same color that they were last year. They’re the same color that they were the year before that and the year before that one, too. There is precisely seven years of neglect piled up in the slivers where paint cracked and broke. The nails are rusty and every step wobbles and creaks as you make your way up them to the front door. My grandma’s prized chair still sits at the top and my grandpa keeps it there as a shrine to her. The rest of the porch is covered in boxes, but there is a large empty space where that chair remains. He doesn’t sit there himself. He doesn’t look at it. And he sure as hell doesn’t move the thing. Ever.
It’s a sad reminder of a time gone by. Til death did they part, and now there is only that space where they once watched the sun set behind the bend. Light shines on it, through it, but it’s still as cold as any winter night. I don’t dare sit on it, either.
Consider it a fear of frostbite.
My brother, sister, and I all joked that grandma would be so overwhelmingly pissed off if she could see the state of her once-precious upstairs. Boxes litter the floor from side-to-side, there are old bed-frames and dressers haphazardly sitting against the wall in no specific arrangement. They are just there, collecting dust, hidden by the boxes and thick blinds over the windows. The floor tiles are starting to come up in random patches. The ceiling has a few wet spots.
That’s where my grandparents used to sleep and it’s probably why grandpa hasn’t spent a single night up there since July of 2010. I can tell that he has a hard time being in that space at all. He tries to joke, tries to avoid eye-contact with the skeleton of his old bedroom set, and quickly makes an excuse to vacate the area. My brother, sister, and I all see him do this and we all understand immediately why he is doing it, but we never say a word. We don’t even look at one another.
Instead, we decide to open up a few boxes to travel through time a little.
The first thing we find is a homemade drawing that my dad did in late 1979 of his favorite band. My grandma must have been especially proud of this piece, because she had it sandwiched between two folders that held legal documents for a car that I have never seen.
I realize in this moment that I inherited my grandma’s connection to inanimate objects. Just like her, I have a complete inability to throw things of sentimental attachment away. My own closet looked very similar; covered from top to bottom in useless knickknacks that only serve to remind me of other human beings. I have a collection of dried-out pens from a summer of writing as a young man, crafting letters to a young girl that I was enamored with. I have a clock that reminds me of a street fair that I went to with a recently departed friend. I could seriously go on and on and on and on about this stuff.
My grandma was obviously much the same. It’s nice to see that, makes me feel like she is still alive in these small ways. Some of her traits leaked onto me. Some on to my sister and a few more on to my brother. When we are all together, and if you squint just hard enough, you can still feel the silhouette of my grandmother there.
She kept the very first portable radio that I ever owned. This little box changed my entire life as a young child. I would put tape after tape into that little slot and record myself acting out anything that my imagination could muster. I’d become an astronaut in the outer reaches of space, losing contact with my home planet and assimilating on a weird, foreign rock with purple creatures that had sixteen eyeballs and no nostrils. Then, after I had concluded my adventure, I would gleefully run inside and rewind the tape with a pencil and listen back on my stories with grandma Weber. She would laugh, she would gasp, and she would humor my craziness in the greatest way possible. My love for the written word exists today largely due to how much she genuinely seemed to enjoy my process (she’s also the reason that I almost never confuse then and than and how to use them).
One day I put that tape recorder down and never picked it back up again. My grandma, having remembered those times with me, couldn’t bring herself to just throw the thing away. So instead, she put it in a box where the thing sat for the next twenty-something years only to be rediscovered by me.
Somewhere in this house, I am convinced that those tapes still exist and I hope that I someday find them.
“I just want to get rid of all this shit.” Grandpa says, gesturing toward the tower of boxes piled up high on the porch.
“I can take them to Goodwill for you if you want me to.” I reply, taping up that final box, and then blotting the last space that light could shine through. The temperature shifts.
“I’m thinking about moving to the new high-rise on Main Street. Just getting rid of all this junk and letting somebody else worry about it.” He points at a broken light fixture on the porch, then toward the deadbolt lock securing the front door.
“I think that’s a fine idea.” I tell him.
There used to be a giant oak tree in the front yard. Grandpa eventually grew convinced that it was the source of their bat problem and became gravely intent on cutting the thing down.
“Dammit beb, that’s where the god damn bats are coming in from.” He used to tell my grandma. She would always respond that he’d destroy that tree over her dead body. After all, it kept the house cool, she reasoned, and by then it already felt like an extended member of the Weber family. You don’t just cut family off (or in this specific case, down to the ground). Still, my grandpa was stubborn and he eventually did take a saw to it one morning while my grandma was out scouring local garage sales. The bat problem was never remedied and, to this day, my grandpa sleeps with a bat-killing tennis racket nearby.
Grandma was not happy about this and let grandpa hear about it for the rest of her life. She couldn’t believe him, couldn’t believe how brazen he was and, most importantly, hated to see the front yard without the big oak tree there. The days of feeding the birds were cut short that very morning. For years after, the front yard always appeared to be missing something. General passersby always thought the same thing, but couldn’t quite put their finger on what that something was. We knew, though. We knew exactly what it was missing.
My little brother Dakota had to grow a baby pine tree in his elementary class one year and offered to plant it where the big oak tree used to be. My grandma loved that idea, grinned from ear-to-ear, and planted it there with him in an act of pure defiance against ol’ grandpa Weber. She put tape around it and fenced it in to protect it from lawnmowers and windstorms in the summer time. The little baby pine was less than a foot tall back then, but my grandma looked at it the same way she used to look at the oak tree.
“You just wait, Bud.” She’d say.
“This one’s going to be even prettier than before!”
I’d like to think that she’d be incredibly happy with how gargantuan that pine tree is now. I know one thing for sure, though:
Not a chance in hell that my grandpa ever cuts it down. Bats or no.
Landmine #6,340:
Grandma used to let us paint this creepy stone statue in her front yard. It was her attempt to make it less creepy and more inviting (I think), and also a neat art project for the grandkids when there was nothing better to do.
The interesting thing is, now that she has passed away, the paint has deteriorated to the point that it’s become way more creepy than it ever would have been had we just left the thing alone.
My sister and I briefly talked about stripping the statue down and giving little Susie a fresh coat. It sounded like a good idea until we remembered Susie’s once-yellow skin and how grandma remarked that it had become something straight out of The Simpsons.
That was enough to stop that idea right in it’s tracks. We all have weird ways of dealing with loss, I suppose, and this was just one of ours.
I didn’t take a picture of this because it is downright depressing to me, but my grandpa never did take down my grandma’s death bed. It still sits there in the dining room under a pile of the oddest porcelain clown statues you will ever see. Each one of them look more depressed than the last; a visual manifestation of the emptiness that sits directly below them. It’s confusing to me why it’s still there, to know that my grandpa has to walk by that dark reminder every time that he wants to leave the house. I know that’s not how she would have wanted to be remembered.
The same could be said about the creepy little girl statue. Or the neglected staircase. Or the abandoned upstairs of their house. Or the fact that the Weber family hasn’t had a single family get-together since grandma died. But people have a weird way of coping with loss.
My grandpa’s method involved little shrines here and there all throughout the house; chairs and clowns and deathbeds and probably more that I just don’t pick up on. My sister’s method was wearing grandma’s endless collection of rings. My brother’s was in that pine tree.
And my method has always been writing about her with an incredible fondness. Concluding harshly, just like she did. Likely too soon.
Always too soon.
