Preservation:
Hello old faces and new. Am I back? *shrug*
I have something to say today and we’ll just have to see what tomorrow brings, ya know?
A Grand Grand Mother
You see, I had a grandmother. A great grand mother. A grand grand mother.
Greyed by time and wisdom long before I existed, she was a tree. Outstretching with shady spots and warm recesses. She boomed in soft house shoes. Called you prescious and meant it. Called you into her presence and yours. A Grand Grand mother.
By the time I was old enough to hear appreciate the hilt of her tender glances, her eyes had weakened. She was sick and I was thirteen. A pair of unlikely friends. By this time, she’d slowed. Not halted but surely slowed. We had developed our “Saturdays” together. Each Saturday, I’d take the ride to a corner of Northside that time seemed to forget, Early, and begin the day with her. A day of leisure and talking with small cleaning tasks dotted throughout. I think the plan had originally been to do a little more cleaning but what can you do. It was as if she was trying to use up all her words. Knowing they’d run out soon. So she told her stories. Told them to me. An ear young enough to hear the soft sway in her voice above the vacuum cleaner. For one year, Four months and twenty-six days, I was her friend and historian. She was my friend and (Something). She was the past, all of it in little body. She was time and nature and music. She was a grand grand mother.
One Saturday, as we prepared the hominy and slab bacon for late breakfast, she peered into the pantry and said “We’ll live in here today.” That was sort of how it was. Look at something, form a loose plan around it and let the day take you. So, after breakfast and a quick story about the day my granddaddy slipped on ice in the winter of ‘56, we commenced.
Now, I should mention that this pantry was really a half a closet. Deep set and dark with no light. Shelves in need of dusting and layered like fossils. Like an archeological dig. And we dug for hours. Pulling up layer upon layer of shelf liner. Finding corned beef from before the Vietnam war. Calling in to hear our echo when we emptied a shelf. That half closet went on for miles, it seemed. It was never ending and, with every trip of my of my dust covered arm, she’d say “should we eat it?”
Around the last few things was a jar. Caked in dust with no label(none surviving anyway). We sat it on the table. Looking at this jar like, at any second, it would rip a hole in space time and fold us up into the universe. We took turns picking up the jar, shaking it to listen for the swish of its contents and setting it back in place.
After some time, cleaning the curtains and looking at the jar, dusting the ceiling fans and looking at the jar, weeding the back garden and looking at the jar; the question burning on the tips of our tongues was finally uttered.
“Should we eat it?”
Well, there was botulism, typhus and salmonella screaming a definitive “No.” But what of adventure? How many times do stand in front of an unidentified, dust-latent jar of food seemingly well preserved for who knows how long with your dying great grandmother on a Saturday afternoon in September? We’d have to at least try!
So, with caution to the wind, botulism be damned, we opened the jar. Calling in the air and the new world into this glass vessel of old, we looked inside.
First, there was really nothing, some brownish liquid you with a cloyingly sweet aroma. It wasn’t thick or thin or anything easy to explain. We took a fork. Digging for something firm, something whole, something we could actually eat and…There it was! Something semi-firm that the fork had pierced straight through. Little resistance but it was firmer than anything we’d hit so far. With careful plucking, in a moment, there it was on the waiting plate. Something like a fruit, maybe a pickle? No seeds to be seen and it was too soft to have ever been a cucumber. Maybe a squash? Wasn’t a cucumber a sort of squash? Or a carrot! No. We’d thought and thought, some out loud and some to ourselves. We sighed simultaneously and knew at once. In order to get any insight, we’d have to chew a little.
I was up first. I was young and healthy and if anything, this thing had a better chance of killing the grand than it did killing me. We cut a small piece. No bigger than a thumb nail and, after a little poking and pondering, it was time to choke it down.
I picked up this mystery and held it to my face. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting for this thing to sprout legs or burst into flames. It didn’t so I opened my mouth. Everything was in slow motion. The grand sat, pretending not to be absolutely on the edge of her seat but as i inched the morsel closer to my mouth, her eyes got wider and wider til…GULP! I had swallowed the whole piece in one go. A little shutter but no taste! No taste, no clarity. Take two.
I took a big breath and closed my eyes. Picked up a piece of mysterious morsel and in it went. A chew and then another chew. By this point, Grand’s eyes are fixed! Waiting for me to make a sound or turn into a pillar of salt.
As much as i had wanted to hate it, to send it back the same way it came, I have to admit…it was pretty tasty. Sweet and salty like a mushy pickle but with a little crunch and a bit of tough outer skin. Looking closer, with the taste still lingering, I had it.
This was…watermelon?
I heard myself mutter it. “Watermelon.” Like a whisper then a little louder. My grandmother, looking down at this point in that light sleeping slump that all elders master, comes catches my second “watermelon” and opens her eyes. A gasp escapes her and there it is. She smiles and there’s a little pause. Did I just eat decades old pickled watermelon?
And there we were, fishing out the remnants of watermelon rind to try and finishing the jar. We laughed as we cleaned up our mess and waded through the rest of the items. Brushed off the labels and saved what we could. It was another Saturday. Another day in creation. It was a day with Grand.
She passed the next year. Quietly, without incident. Just took a breath and was gone. I was there in the hospital, wondering whether I should join her and leave this world too. My grand grandmother. A giant lying feeble in her bed. Breathing shallow as I whispered to myself, “it was watermelon.” I laughed. Not a big laugh, just a chuckle between the tears and a little sniff. It was watermelon.
—-
I hold these memories in a box in my heart. They remind me to preserve some part of myself. To preserve the love. To keep hold of the pieces that remind me of the hope surrounding me. They hold me close. So hold yours too.