#Inktober52, #Inktober, "Bubbles"

I was hiking around to endless historical monuments on a hot, sunny day with a friend when I said, "I need to stop for a pop" as we walked by a convenience store.  My friend burst into merry laughter.  My face rearranged itself into absolute befuddlement.  I didn't see anything funny in my declaration.  I was hot and thirsty.  My friend didn't have the faintest idea what I was talking about.  "A Pepsi, Coke, something like that", I clarified, shaking my head at the obvious.  "Oh!  A soda!"  In my mind, a soda is something from the 1950's when teenyboppers went to the soda shop for a malt, but okay.  I realize more of you out there say soda than pop, but you have to admit pop is a better word when you open the bottle.

Someone else recently reminisced with me about going to her grandparents and getting pop from the basement.  "Me too!"  Happy grandparent stories flowed back and forth and I vividly tasted Vernor's ginger ale even though I haven't tasted it in years.  It's amazing how these things stay with us, and how much little things matter down the road when it didn't seem to make that much difference at the time.  We just had practical grandparents who put soda pop in the basement because the basement was cool and brought it upstairs when the grandkids were there because they loved us.  It's these little moments that made us feel special and secure.

The other day I contemplated what to have for supper.  I seem to have gotten very vegetarian during the shutdown and I have to say I'm sick and tired of vegetables.  I flashed back to dinner at Grandma's and wished so strongly for one of her basic meals of ham, mashed potatoes, and green beans.  I wanted it so badly I could smell the ham and hear her putting a spoon down on her stainless steel kitchen counter.  I thought of Grandpa and his perennial assortment of Chex cereal and ever-present vanilla ice milk.  Tinkling dishes, cheerful laughter, and ice tea.  Vernor's pop, full of sugar and bubbles, in the middle of the day, for no real reason other than my grandparents knew I liked it.

I saw a post where a 10-year-old girl created a door screen out of a shower curtain and plastic bags so she could hug her grandma during the shutdown.  Yay for the kid!  But gee, it sucks to be separated from your grandma!  Maybe all this separation will prove to teach more of us to appreciate people while we have them?

Happy memories keep us warm inside when faced with too many vegetables, but it isn't all about looking back.  It's about thinking about your priorities and making decisions about what you want now and in the future.  Our thoughts create possibilities.

Thinking about drinking a bubbly pop on a hot summer day may not seem important at all.  Remembering merry laughter between friends is important.  It isn't about things, it's about people.  I'm really hoping that everyone appreciates their people even more when they can hug each other again.

This art is just a TV doodle around the time I was salivating over Grandma's ham :)

"Soar"

Gentle breezes waft around the Glen, but you need actual wind to fly a kite.  I ran and ran on my short child legs without much to show for it.

We went to see our grandparents every month.  Grandpa would take us to GoodyearHeights Metro Park after lunch.  Women washed dishes while children and men walked to the pond and woods.  

In winter we went sledding.  There’s a little but steep hill close to their house, and a very big hill on the other side of the park.  The little hill has the extra thrill of trees in the wrong places.  The big hill has a bump which sends whole toboggans of adults airborne.  That hill is also great for kites in summer.  Kites soared from a standstill.  They flew so strong, I worried I’d be dragged to the sun and die like Icarus.

One day my siblings ran down the steep little hill to the pond, and Grandpa and I stayed behind.  He really didn’t say much.  Well, to be perfectly honest, he never did, but what he did say was in a soft Tennessee accent that makes me feel safe, loved, and happy.

On that last day at the park I just held his hand and absorbed our alone-time together.  I don’t know how I knew it was our last day, I just did, and I relished it.  He lived a long time after that, he just didn't walk to the park.  He drove us to the big hill to fly kites.

I miss Grandpa.  Happy birthday!  Happy birthday Sue!  And Dad and Tami, and coming up Bill, ML, and Gail... plus my grandnieces and whoever else I might be forgetting.  Oh yeah, Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Joyous Solstice too!

Mess Hall

Totally unrelated to birthdays, holidays, and kiting, but everything to do with parks, my friend and I walked in my old Girl Scout camp last weekend.  It has been bought by her city, and now is open to everyone.

Amity House

Boat house

I looked forward to August all year every year when I was a kid.  My sisters and I had a week at Grandma and Grandpa's, and then we had two weeks at Camp Hilaka.  Yay, yay, yay for me!

The old metal bridge is the same as when I was a kid

I was great at camp.  I could start a fire, paddle a canoe, braid a lanyard, and sing campfire songs with the best of them.  I learned early that fearlessly ridding a tent of spiders and mice ensured me camping friends.  Some girls cried when their parents dropped them off at camp.  I wanted to cry when I left.

Outhouse -- a very memorable part of camping!

The camp is pretty dilapidated, and I hope volunteers will get it looking nice again.  I walked the paths and felt my younger self running through the woods while my current self was kind of befuddled about what used to be where and such.  I remembered the handsome boy counselor with a guitar well enough and the very nice girl with a raspberry stain all over her face and over a lot of the rest of her too. 

It's the smells and sounds and projects which I remember best, and it all feels very strange to place all that living into a neglected park.  I'm going to walk there again and bring back more memories and more of that childish enthusiasm back into my being.  Camp Hilaka is like Grandpa -- part of who I am.

"Home"

I wrote about my house last week.  Maybe I should’ve talked about it as “home”?  It’s definitely lived in.  I have great plans to clean it this weekend too.  I’ll see what actually gets done by Monday.

I don’t know if I think of my house as my home most of the time.  This is where I live and keep all my stuff.  Having lived here a long time, I do have memories of cooking holiday dinners for family, puppies piddling on my floors, my little brothers curled up on the couch watching Disney movies – back when they were actually little and still cuddled up to each other.

I had a deep need for a home when I was a young adult, maybe a deeper need than any of my peers.  I need a place that’s mine, a place to rest between my interactions with the world.  A friend of mine always wants to travel and views his apartment as a place to be in between trips.  We’re at opposite sides of a spectrum – but he relishes his trips to his sister’s house during holidays.  That gives him enough of a center.  We all need a safe place where we belong, even if it’s not our own place.

My grandparents provided that kind of oasis.  In a discussion with my siblings, all of us said we felt loved, and none of us claimed that we felt loved more than anyone else.  The kitchen always smelled of good things, and Grandpa gave us ice cream and Vernor’s.  The rules were clear and sane, and we were encouraged to play.

We played Rook at the dining room table in the evenings, which according to Wikipedia is a card game “played with a specialized deck of cards. Sometimes referred to as "Christian cards" or "missionary poker"… introduced by Parker Brothers in 1906 as an alternative for those in the Puritan tradition or Mennonite culture who considered face cards in a regular deck inappropriate because of their association with gambling and cartomancy."

Well, I learn new things every day.  It makes perfect sense though.  Grandma was from an area of Ohio with a lot of Amish and Mennonites.  Even though she wasn’t one of them, she was pretty straight-laced Christian, though not in any kind of irritating way.

Anyway, the quiet evenings of pleasant cards and tea is a part of my life, a place where I felt home.  The candy dish was always full, my uncle always had new projects to try, and the sheets on the bed were always crisp and soft.  The soap smelled of roses and the quiet rustle of fabric was loud in the quiet.  I can still hear Grandma laughing and Grandpa chuckling.

“Over the river and through the woods, to Gramma’s house we go!” And the long drive we took every month passed quickly enough because we knew the drive was worth it.

Whatever your beliefs, wherever you’re going during the holidays, I wish for you a place that you find special with people you love.  And if you can’t have these things this year, may you have memories that keep you warm.

Merry Christmas!

"Freeze"

My grandpa stayed with me for a while once.  I had a waterbed, which he was absolutely sure he couldn’t sleep on until he woke up the next day and said he had the best night’s sleep in decades.  He strongly suggested that I iron the sheets with starch during his stay, but no matter how much I loved him, I wasn’t about to iron sheets, and I’m real sure I didn’t own starch.  Then he requested “dry apple pie”, which didn’t even make sense in my mind.  Why would someone put dried apples in a pie?  He couldn’t give me a recipe, and that was before instant internet recipes, so Grandpa didn’t get his pie either.  Don’t worry, he didn’t go hungry, but ironed sheets and pies?!  Grandma spoiled him.

Since I wasn’t burning my life ironing sheets and baking, Grandpa had a lot of time to tell me about drying apples.  He grew up in Tennessee, and the late summer days had a lot of sunshine to dry out apples laid out on the barn roof.  He talked about life before stores (?!), when they had to make everything from scratch or it didn’t exist.  Pillows were stuffed with the chest feathers of geese, Clothes were made at home, and his favorite toy was a stick whittled into a gun.  He told me about that gun twice, in way too much detail.  He talked about going into the mountains in winter with the menfolk to saw up frozen lake ice.  They packed the ice in straw and loaded it onto horse-drawn wagons which they drove home to store in underground pits lined with more straw.  Grandpa said the ice often lasted through most of the summer.  They needed the ice to keep food fresh because this was life before refrigerators.  Iced tea was a luxury for company.

Grandpa was born in 1896.  He served in WWI, but got the flu in the great epidemic so he didn’t go to Europe to fight.  He was disappointed about that when he was young because he liked traveling.  He was of a generation after the Civil War, and that war wiped out the family finances since they were on the losing side.  Grandpa said they were “land rich and money poor”, so he hopped on a train to Detroit for work.  The train stopped in Akron, Ohio and he and his brother stayed because they were told there was work in Akron.  He worked for Goodyear until his retirement, which all happened before I was born.  Grandpa was always old in my mind, but I suppose he was young once.  He talked about parties he attended in the neighboring county, drinking and carousing, and all sorts of stuff I couldn’t imagine of my completely sober Grandpa.

I thought he was handsome, and women seemed to think it too.  When I see pictures of Matthew McConaughey, I think Grandpa.  Well, maybe not quite as buff, but for all I know, Matthew has a place in my family tree, and Grandpa was buff in his day before Grandma was fattening him up with pies.  Or perhaps white people all look alike?  Or Southerners are all related?

I wanted Grandpa to tell me stories about the people he knew when he was young, but he just didn’t.  He talked about activities, like sawing the ice or watching his grandma plucking feathers from very mad geese.  I knew he loved his grandma, but I don’t have any details about why he loved her except that she made dried apple pies.  I don’t know if it matters.  The way he told stories, or didn’t tell them, was part of who he was.  The fact that he took pictures of steam engines, or the tv during the moon landing, was a reflection of the fact that he lived through a lifetime of miracles.  We talk about the wonders of the internet, but what about living in a life before electricity, cars, vaccines, tv… when ice in tea was precious?