Grandma's house
Grandma was a tall woman, she wore her hair in curlers until she got me off the bus, because that was going out for the day. Her house smelled like cake. Grandpa played leggos, and decorated for Christmas like a mad man every year. There was a family room and a living room. The family room was dark and me and dad slept there every morning before school. The blanket I slept under, I still have. It was rainbow, and dad told me later it was made of scraps. Grandma would wake up, happy to see us, to see me, and she was also made of scraps. Scraps of the person she had been, the people she had met, and her own strong, intense will.
Grandma became slowly, but surely, afraid of the world after grandpa died in their upstairs bathroom. Death was too close to home and she was afraid to leave. It stopped smelling like cake after he died, and started smelling like sadness. It stayed clean, she would never make a mess to clean up. She didn’t think eating was important. She ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day unless me and my dad took her out to church and breakfast. She passed out sometimes. The lights were too much for her. She told me “I wish I was dead”.
She had a blue carpet in the living room, and it looked like the sky on a beautiful day. She had a coffee table I danced on for her. Slowly, so closely that nobody else noticed, she faded like the carpet, always exposed to the sun. She became afraid of everything, irritable, but never with me. I’d come every day and ask about our family, so she could think about the days she wasn’t alone. She told me I was her favorite while she showed me the same pictures over and over and slowly forgot the people in them. I reminded her.
Grandma left for a while, and it was hard to get her back. She’d had another stroke, and they said she couldn’t care for herself anymore because her brain, even before this, was not doing well.
She wasn’t the same when she came back, she was quieter now, even with me. There was red on the blue carpet, and nobody could explain it. The house didn’t smell like cake anymore. She smelled like grandma, she looked like her, and every now and then she would laugh at the things I knew she would. She wasn’t the same.
They put her in a home and she fought them the whole time “I need to go home”. They tried to make it like home, put all of her things with her. “I need to go home”. She was a proud woman, and one that knew herself. She told me once, long before she was there, about the old people who would escape from the nursing home and wait by the road for a bus that never came. If only she knew that she would do the same thing. A strong, tall, thin woman, she fought her way from the nursing home more than once to stand on the street alone, waiting for a bus that did not come. They didn’t like her, because she didn’t speak to them, just ran to the life she knew as hers.
The most important woman in my life died one day, when a cousin of mine said “We don’t need you to hold on”. She left the room and she hit a flat line. A sentiment I’d said, the youngest of the grandchildren and the most involved, but a thousand times. She met my grandfather, who played leggos, at the grocery store, and they shopped together for dinner. They went home and she put her hair in curlers for the event of making him happy. She went home and looked through the photo albums, and she remembered every name. She kissed him and they had dinner, while they put up the Christmas tree. I miss her every day, and I wish she did not fade through like the old blue carpet in her living room.
