two brothers in a tiny frame house my father built on the junkyard, this was the house where we came to spend Saturdays with Grandmama. I remember, then, her house being endless, room after room of quiet refuge. Here we were most free, having escaped for a day the endless work Daddy demanded of us at the junkyard—long hours of hauling, toting, stripping, stacking, pulling nails, chipping bricks, digging, picking up, painting, washing, cleaning, cooking.
To earn our keep at Grandmama’s, and to ensure an invitation to return, we worked for her as well, but it was clean, easy work. My sister washed Grandmama’s short, permed hair over the bathroom sink and rolled it on pink, prickly curlers. I polished silverware with a rag and a little jar of polish, making the forks and spoons gleam. We swept the walk. Mostly, however, when we got dropped off at Grandmama’s we were at liberty to pursue frivolous interests: paper folding and recipe copying and woods looking. Nor did she have the same rules as my father, so her house was a place of freedom of thought. We could watch television and read the newspaper there. And did. We wandered and played, exploring the pasture, the water hole, the creek, the wooden bridge, the cow trails through the woods. We dared not enter the woods beyond the water hole, for there lay a bottomless head, where springs seeped to the surface through quicksand. Daddy had once plunged a cane pole twenty feet down, without hitting bottom.
Grandmama’s house was the horn of plenty. She had food that my own parents could not afford and time that Mama didn’t have to bake. A chocolate or pound cake waited under the bell-glass at Grandmama’s, or in the freezer to be thawed. Always. Grandmama’s candy jars were full. At Christmas, which was not a celebration at our house, she cut a two-foot limb of many-branching haw and stuck sugared gumdrops onto the ends of its twigs; we would gape at the candy tree, mouths watering. We yearned toward the cookie jar Grandmama kept full despite the humidity and the sugar ants. We knew better than to ask for food, so we prayed that Grandmama would offer a sweet to us. We would sit politely, as we had been taught to do, hoping beyond hope that she would ask, Did we want a lemon drop? When she was in the back of the house, or in the bathroom, one of us would check out the cookie jar in the corner cupboard and report back.
“Are there cookies in it?”
“Yeah.” At a whisper.
“What kind?”
“Kind of big and flat, with curved edges.”
“Store-bought?”
“Yeah.”
At our house at the edge of town, nothing lasted. We were forever running out of something. I know we were well fed, but we felt eternally hungry, ravenous; Mama was always trying to fill us. There was never enough food to sate us. I remember staring into Grandmama’s freezer and refrigerator, and standing before the pantry shelves, gawking.
“What are you looking for, honey?” she would ask, and I would turn away, embarrassed. “Just looking,” I would say. I could not believe such plenty.
Sometimes, unable to help ourselves, we would snitch a cookie or a piece of candy if the jar was close to full and the loss wouldn’t be apparent. If one of us took, we all did—at least we three younger, hungrier children did. Sometimes we agreed beforehand that one of us would pocket enough for all three. My sister, who was four years my elder, showed more restraint.
Grandmama was shorter than most women, so I was not yet ten when I grew taller than she and had to bend to hug her. She lived in her rich, sugary house with a younger, dapper Uncle Percy, who worked the counter at an auto parts store in town and rode a ’47 Harley. By then, Granddaddy Arthur was dead of cancer. He died when I was five. I remember him as benevolent, bringing gum and candy, the same treat for each of us. I never remember an unkind word spoken by or about him. Except for his pipe stand and gun rack, by the time I was old enough to pay attention to the depths of things, no sign of him remained in the house.
Most any week in summer or fall, Grandmama had fruit on the trees in the yard or in the lane. Tormented by visions of peppermints and candy corn, we foraged outside like bear cubs, eating dewberries, blackberries, huckleberries, plums, crab apples, apples, pears, grapes, pomegranates, peaches, pecans. Nobody cared what we ate from the vines and trees. The fruit was often small and worm ridden, but a wasp sting on a green apple was the least of our concerns.
We loved this place that was not our life. We loved its normalcy and the flowers that bloomed all over the place. We loved the fact that our grandmother looked and acted like other grandmothers. She did not mean to withhold that which we craved—she had no way of knowing how much we longed for her treats, and for her grandmother-liness. At midmorning she would commence to preparing dinner, the midday meal—creamed corn, fried ham, biscuits, boiled okra, green beans, stewed squash, rice, and tomatoes. The vegetables came from the garden, which she plundered before breakfast, before we arrived. We ate until we could hold no more, but not piggishly. We were on even better behavior at Grandmama’s than at our own iron-ruled house.
The ancient longleaf pine outside the concrete steps of the back door dropped piles of needles, making a rug around itself, and it was often our job on Saturdays to rake the straw up. Grandmama kept her tools in good working order, so when called to rake we might choose from many instruments—bamboo and flimsy, iron and heavy, tin and light. A heap of leaves and straw is irresistible to a child, who will run and leap into it, over and over, and sometimes burrow to the ground, emerging covered with pine debris, looking like a porcupine. Especially when cousins were visiting, we made ourselves houses from the pine straw. We outlined rooms like an architect’s plan—kitchen, living room, bedrooms—constructing the walls of pine straw, leaving gaps for doors between the rooms and for doors to the outside. We piled the walls as high as they’d go.
When our house of straw was built, we played charades through the rooms, cooking in the kitchen, making beds, sweeping with our rakes. We sat in the rooms and talked about what we would become one day, teachers and nurses and engineers and truck drivers. In our imaginary house under the blue sky, we lived out not our dreams, for we were too young to know dreams beyond those inherited from our parents, but a continuation of the lives we had already entered.
As an adult, I walk the same yard where I pretended to sleep on a straw bed, and I walk through walls I would not have dared ignore when I erected them of nothing, and now I do not live in the imaginary house but in the real house the imaginary one was modeled on. It is a dream I never dreamed, and if someone, an aunt or my grandmother, had told me that it would come to pass, I would not have believed them. As a child I never would have believed it would be my great fortune to live in the real house, the one made to last lifetimes, not an afternoon, the one full of chocolate pie and gingerbread, and endless peace.
What is it in us that wants to return to the dream of childhood, to reenact it or fix it? What is it in us that keeps coming back to that potent place? Sometimes I am afraid the house will burn to the ground, the way the original house burned, the way we were finally forced by oncoming dark to destroy our imaginary houses and haul the straw in Uncle Percy’s wheelbarrow to the burn pile.
The outhouse fell. The smokehouse fell. Three of the pines in the yard blew over in a storm, like towers of cards. An apple tree fell. The chicken coop fell. The sassafras in the field fell. My grandmother fell. I don’t think the house is a dwelling anyone ever thought would last. Yet it stands, and because it represents what lasts, or what so far has lasted, I was happy to live in it. Something from long ago was yet alive, both inside and outside of me. Finally, the two were one.
Living on the family farm, I was surrounded by all the ghosts of my ancestors, with their undying desires, although all I knew about most of them was the stories that were told, long after their deaths. How all my mother remembers of my birdlike great-grandmother, Mary, was one glimpse she got standing on tiptoes, peering into her casket. Mary’s husband, Walt, was a tall man who loved to work with wood. By day and by night I could feel the presence of those who had also known and loved this land, who had brought my life into being, whose names were written in stone in the graveyards or lost forever. I lived much closer to the dead than the half mile to the cemetery would indicate.
I had a dream once in which my grandmother, who was as small as a child, was lying in a sickroom, close to death. My grandfather and Uncle Percy