To Grandmother’s House I Go...
Cheryl Somers Aubin
Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
As I step over the threshold and into Mrs. Garcia’s home, I also step back in time. A feeling rises up in me, like the pull of a full moon on the sea.
The yearning for this house, for the days and nights I stayed here after our family moved away from California when I was a child, the longing for this home, my last physical connection to a place I have always loved and always missed, has reawakened.
Mrs. Garcia has been kind enough to let my 13-year-old son, Charlie, and me in after I explain that we are visiting from Virginia, and her home had once been my grandmother’s home. This is the first house my grandmother ever bought, and the house my mother sold once strokes had stolen my grandmother’s memory and her ability to manage her own affairs.
As we start talking, Mrs. Garcia’s daughter, Isabella, translates our conversations because I do not speak Spanish and Mrs. Garcia does not speak much English.
The living room is smaller than I remember, of course, but the same fireplace is still there. The very same gas logs that warm this southern California home when it gets
chilly had warmed my grandmother and our family, too. I gesture and explain that this is the wall that held my grandmother’s sofa; here’s where the chair she loved to sit in would have been.
A large family picture now hangs over the fireplace and Isabella tells me her mother has raised eleven children in this home, and she now has 24 grandchildren. Mrs. Garcia points to other pictures along the walls as well, all filled with smiling, happy faces of her family’s many generations. We look at her family, and our eyes go over to Charlie and then to each other as we both smile. We didn’t need to speak the same language to understand the pride a mother has in her family.
Mrs. Garcia shows me her bedroom, which is painted bright orange now, not the pale ivory I remember. I gesture again: here’s where my grandmother had her bed, and that’s where the Big Ben clock sat. I recall one of my favorite memories: being so young and crawling into grandmother’s bed with her cozy, pink, flannel sheets and snuggling with her, her body soft and round curving against my skinny legs and her arms in a protective embrace around me.
I pass a small room that Mrs. Garcia’s son now uses. This is the room my mother slept in one Christmas visit with the door open and one eye on me trying to sleep on the couch. I don’t know why they put me in the living room with the tree and all the presents that year. I remember vibrating with excitement and how tempting it was to look at the new packages my mother had put out while I’d waited in the kitchen earlier.
Once I thought my mother was asleep, I had slowly slipped out of the sheets, my legs still prickled by the material on the couch and tried hard in the dim light to see which presents were for me. As I knelt closer to read the tags I heard my mother’s voice, “Get back to bed now, Cheryl.”
We look into the bathroom, and a memory comes to me. On one visit I’d walked around the block, picking up a feather that ended up having little bugs on it which then covered me. Grandmother and mom cleaned me off and put me in the bath. The pink tub with the faucet in the middle, which allowed the tub to fill almost to overflowing made me feel like I was swimming. I remember the pink walls, the powdery smell of the soft, rose-covered towels they used to dry me off. The Garcia family had remodeled this one bathroom in the house. The pink tub is gone, and the bathroom was now in shades of beige and brown.
Grandma’s “Hawaiian Room” is now Isabella’s bedroom. I try, but probably fail, to explain what this room was like to Mrs. Garcia and her daughter. As wide as the living room but narrow, I had walked through strings of beads hanging from the ceiling to get into this room that my brother, sister, and I had all loved. The exotic small bottles of amber-colored liquids behind the bar, the fishnet hanging on the wall with shells stuck in it, the small intimate feel of the room that hinted of the exotic. I don’t know if my grandmother ever traveled to Hawaii, but I like to think she did.
Going back through the living room, I trail my hand along a wall. Memories are etched on these walls by each person, each family, each mother, each granddaughter.
On my way into the dining room, I reach up and run my fingers along the archway, needing to feel the house, the curves, the cool plaster beneath my fingers, like reading braille, I am reading the walls with my fingertips.
I turn my head away to compose myself and try to stop the tears that are now falling. I miss my grandmother, even though she's been gone for many years. And I miss the life I had here in California. I miss the sunshine and the warmth and the orange groves in our own home’s backyard and I miss— I miss the easy way our family had— each of us tethered together, like balloons floating toward the sky, sometimes bumping into one another, but safe and grounded in our parents' hands. We moved so many times after we left California that I often felt adrift and alone and different. So this visit here, to this state, to my grandmother's house, has made me mourn all that was lost when we moved away.
I remember the hutch that stood against one wall in the dining room, the way the table was positioned, the round plates that hung in a small alcove. I wonder, is this the corner where my grandmother had proudly displayed the all-white Christmas tree one year? The one with blue, red, and green bulbs with a blue, red, and green revolving light that shined on it?
We go through to the newly renovated kitchen, and where the microwave and laundry are now, was my grandmother’s small breakfast nook. All windows with the sun shining in. Purple violets had lined every windowsill, flowers that always made me think of my grandmother when I saw them, flowers I have tried to grow many times over the years
and failed.
We step outside into the backyard, and we meet Mr. Garcia. It turns out that he was my grandmother’s gardener and he had bought this house from her all those years ago. He tells me about my grandmother, that she always invited him in for cake and cookies when he worked for her. He smiles at the memory of the time he was cutting around
the edge of the grass while she was talking over the fence to a neighbor and a stone caught in the blade and shot out and hit her right in the bottom. He’d been so worried at first but was relieved when my grandmother turned around and was laughing.
We look around the backyard and it is both different and familiar. Mr. Garcia points out the original trees that have been there for decades. And then I spy the statue of the deer.
My grandmother’s sister, my Great Aunt Jenny, had owned this deer made of concrete. The deer my brother, sister, and I had sat on for so many pictures when it had been in Jenny’s backyard, the yard with all the rosebushes. The long wooden antlers have been broken off. The paint now faded, worn off with 11 children and 24 grandchildren playing and sitting on it.
I pat the deer’s nose, his flank, memories flooding me. I persuade my own son to sit on the deer, his long legs splay out on either side. His lop-sided smile spreads on his face and I smile, too. I raise my camera and capture this image. Later he takes a picture of me, sitting sideways on the deer and laughing, while my heart again fills and I blink back tears. Charlie comes to me and puts his arm around my shoulder, and whispers, “It’s okay, Mom.”
The Garcias tell me how much their family loves that deer, the grandchildren all play with it when they visit. Still, through her daughter, Mrs. Garcia offers to give the deer to me, but I know it is theirs now, just like the house, the yard, and the memories they have made, and the ones they’ve yet to make.
We walk over to the garage. It’s painted the same color it was back then, a soft yellow. It’s now a home to relatives and others who have stayed with the family for a while. When I was a child though, this was a magical place. We’d wait patiently while a grownup opened the overhead door. Once when it was part-way open, my brother, sister, and I would run in, racing to find old trunks and boxes filled with treasures I wish I had now. I remember the rustle of fabric, the old baby carriage, that strong old wood smell, and the promise of what would be inside on our latest visit. I curl my hands aching to touch and explore these things that are no longer there.
At the end of our visit, as Mrs. Garcia and Isabella walk us down the driveway toward our car, Mrs. Garcia stops and bends down. “Look here, lady,” she says to me, pointing to some coins at the side of the driveway.
When her husband widened the driveway years ago, she placed a penny with the year of each of her children’s birth in the wet cement. We walk along slowly together as she wipes off each penny, gently patting it when she finishes. I bend down and touch some of them, too. My son stands close to me as I smile through my tears and thank Mrs. Garcia. We hug each other and then in halting English she says, “Your home, too.”
Cheryl Somers Aubin
Cheryl Somers Aubin has been writing and publishing for almost 30 years, and her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Foundation Magazine and other newspapers, magazines, and online journals. She has an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. Cheryl teaches memoir writing and is a featured speaker at book festivals, writing conferences, and workshops. Her first book, The Survivor Tree: Inspired by a True Story, is available at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.