Return to the Soil, Part 3

One of my earliest and fondest childhood memories is bolting out of the station wagon to the swinging gate that led to the back yard, undoing the wire latch, and flying down the descending concrete walkway that led to the back porch of the ranch house. Usually, my grandmother would have already heard us coming up the road and would greet me at the screen door, arms open wide, ready to catch my propelled body in motion. Sometimes she wasn’t there, but the wafting smells of creamy polenta and hot venison stew that billowed out from the kitchen, and the pre-set dinner table that gave evidence to the anticipation of my arrival, gave her immunity for not holding her post. Either way, my grand entrances always had the sensation of a willful and glorious freefall, landing in the comfort of her embrace, my cheek pressed against her apron.  

 

As I cascaded down the Sierra Mountains in my little white jeep, this was the exact sensation, the precise memory that revisited me. Stretches of I80 and the sequence of passing towns became as increasingly familiar as the cracks in the concrete that led to her back door. There returned the familiar longing to hurry up, just so as to close the physical gap that separated us. I found myself quietly murmuring words I had hollered as a child, “I’m here, grandma…. I’m here!” Drinking two quarts of oil a day, I had already pushed that poor little Jeep harder than it should have ever been pushed. Under the hood laid a thick blanket of black from the engine blow-over, but like a seasoned racehorse, it could feel my palpable need to reach the finish line.

 

I drove around the block so I could easily park my little rig in front of my folk’s house. The last time I had called home was the night before, from Utah, so my arrival was expected to be in the early evening. I had made real good time. I walked through the front door as I had done a million times before. It was like any other day. It was as if I hadn’t been gone for the past seven years or just drove up after five solid days of driving the open road by myself. There was no grand “welcome home,” no special meal prepared. The house was actually messier than ever before. There was clearly too much happening on a daily basis to make any big to-do about my return.

 

The strain put on my mother, having to balance full-time elder care, a full-time private business, and a part-time day-care for my sister’s three small children, all under one roof, had made itself evident in every room, on every surface, behind every door. The T.V. was blaring, the heater was on, and my grandmother sat weak and frail in the lazy-boy, under a feather-down blanket in the middle of July. A reduced version of her former self, she stared blankly in the direction of the television, listening more so than watching to the Wayne Brady Show. Her sight was gone, her hearing was faint, yet her presence was still dominating. She sat in that worn and stained canvas chair as though it was a throne. Her cane, the same one that had propped up my grandfather 40 years prior, was like a thyrsus. To this day, her great-grandchildren who were mere toddlers at the time remember it as an indisputable extension of her greatness, equally used to roll a ball across the room for them to chase, as it was to dole out lashings for bad behavior. Her days consisted of migrating from the living room, which had been transformed into a bedroom since climbing stairs was no longer an option, to the kitchen, to the family room, and back again. One trip was enough to exhaust her. Yet still, she prepared her own toast and coffee, made her own bed, loaded the dishwasher, folded the laundry, and would even tend to the baby. Her faculties may have been failing, but there was seemingly nothing that could minimize her sense of independence, self-reliance, and control.

 

We visited and caught up. We talked about the latest news, politics, and family gossip in between her frequent naps and the usual household distractions. Among the daily rhetoric, she would routinely try to convince me that I should go on the Wayne Brady Show.

 

“Sing a little something. He always has talented people on his show. You just write in and he puts you on his show!”