Visions and Revisions

There's a rather sad trend unfolding this summer, one fairly new to me. I mentioned before that Matisse died shortly before Mom and Dad moved. Lady, the golden retriever who occupied much of the same post in Kim's household that Matisse did in mine, died last week. And earlier this week Grandma died after a long and difficult winding-down. She went peacefully, which was a relief to everyone, and in some ways she's been gone a long time, so her passing didn't come as anything of a surprise. But I'm going to miss her. Death at a distance does strange things to memory.

She was the last of my grandparents, and unquestionably the one I got to know best--when one is the late offspring of parents who were themselves late offspring, the timing just doesn't work in one's favor. I could recite vast catalogues about visiting Grandma, each memory in full color and high resolution: the thrill of ringing her doorbell; playing with a veritable zoo of multicolored plastic animals in a tub overflowing with bubbles; the smell of the "powder room" half of the bathroom; watching in fascination as she worked on yet another of those silly hook rugs; solving word-search puzzles; eating popcorn for dinner; humming along to the chiming of the clock that hung above her sofa; repainting the beak and legs of the godawful concrete chicken that stood in her back yard with red nail polish; later, harassing Neeko until he fled to the back bedroom to hide; choking down dry Christmas sugar cookies that had been baked before Halloween; and playing hundreds, thousands, countless games of cards.

Her visits to us, holidays at the houses of various aunts and uncles, and our shared vacations to northwestern Washington are, if not more difficult to recollect, at least several orders of magnitude less clear. I remember Grandma in her house. At Grandma's House. I feel almost guilty about it, as though I am imprisoning her in her own apartment. But the fact of the matter is that Grandma and Grandma's House were a permanent fixture in a transient child's life. She rarely rearranged the furniture and never seemed to buy anything new. I can recall the minute details of her house with a vividness that I find startling. It's one of the only places in the world where I could mark time, where the surroundings were so familiar that I could feel the presence of my own age--at Grandma's house, I was the thing that changed. Grandma got older, but she was always there, and the reassuring sameness of her house tended to occlude the slow changes wrought in its occupant. I could always go back to Grandma's. Her house and her presence in it exist so permanently in my mind that, to be honest, her death doesn't seem very real.