Going Home
I grew up a military brat, and moving was a normal way of life for us. But, there was one place that was constant, a place I knew blindfolded—my grandparents.
For decades my grandparents’ nursery and garden center was a popular spot to catch up on the local chatter, buy your tomato plants, find the perfect fire engine red geraniums, purchase your rye seed for the fall, and search through the hundreds of poinsettias in the number three greenhouse until you found the right ones to give to Aunt Edith and Cousin Debbie for Christmas.
When we went home to see my grandparents, I was already racing through the doors in search of my twin pillars before the car stopped. The perfume of machine oil, gasoline, dirt, and fertilizer was like freshly baked bread on a cold day to my nose, and I would holler for them and hear a loud and hearty “YO!” drawing me like a magnet to their sides. I spent my days scampering about the hard-packed dirt floors of the three greenhouses amongst the jewel-colored plants that sat on long, wide tables sticking white plastic price sticks into the soil or carrying plants to the cash register for customers who knew me by name. If it was slow, I?searched for treasures in the dusty lofts upstairs, climbed mountains of bagged peat moss and gravel, and helped my grandmother plant seedlings at the potting bench.
Last week I went back to celebrate my grandmother’s ninety-fifth birthday. Her beautiful bloom is beginning to fade; however, in my mind, she is eternally fifty with frosted blonde hair pinned off the nape of her neck, gold hoop earrings, and jeans. My grandfather still makes me shake my head. He couldn’t wait to tell me it was time for his exercises and got on his stationary bike to ride for thirty minutes, and he still sports pants with creases sharp enough to cut steak like a hot knife through butter.
I arrived at the house late, and when I opened the door, there was a bittersweet nostalgia as I looked around. Every corner, every stick of furniture holds a memory from the floorboard in the hallway that squeaks; to the cuckoo clock that would bust me coming home late from a date; to knowing, without a doubt, that in the second drawer behind my grandfather’s kitchen chair is a sleeve of Doublemint gum.
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The next morning, I looked out through the picture window in the living room toward the corner. It had been too dark and cold the night before to see much. I was mentally prepared for what I would find when I pulled back the drapes; however, I still felt like someone had sucker-punched me. My playground, my home, the nursery, is no more. How does the song go? “Pave paradise to put up a parking lot?” In this case, it is not a parking lot but a lovely subdivision with seasonal wreaths on the front doors and neatly cut yards. The acres of land where I ran wild are gone, along with the tire swing in the back field. The rows of mysterious evergreens are no more, and the oak trees covered in moody dark green ivy that held up the canvas hammock where I would spend hours reading have become the foundation of these new homes.
I stood outside looking at these quaint houses and looked past them, blocking out the noise of the street, and my senses came alive at the memories of my childhood—the screams of disgust at smelling a decomposing egg two weeks after the epic Easter egg hunt. Eating tomato sandwiches in the shade of the oaks on the cool concrete table, finding my grandfather in the back and being rewarded with a giggling, bumpy ride back to the store on the hand truck, and tasting the cold water from the hose bibb as I stuck my head under it to get a drink on a hot day.
For now, I’ll put these memories back in the little box, but that is not to say they will stay there. That is the great thing about being a writer. These memories will resurface down the road in another book, and who knows? If I’m lucky, they might make a reader stop and smile and say, “I remember when..”