Blue Hydrangeas
My grandmother is dead. Her house is already not her house. Her presence lingers only faintly like the perfume of a woman who has just left the room.
Already, this house is not her home. The one she spent sixty-five years of her life living in, most of them as a solitary widow. It was a place that in all that time had never changed. Especially the parlor and dining room, where I spent every Thanksgiving and Christmas as a child. The gold, textured carpet, the amber glass sconces, the teacups behind glass, the feathers and dried flowers in glazed pots, the old photographs of my dead grandfather in his uniform, and the dark wood furniture with intricate carvings under glass that I hardly ever saw because it was always covered by cloths to protect it. I remember when my mom and I would help pull down the curtains to clean and hang them back up on sharp metal hooks evenly spaced to create perfect pleats. I remember dusting the gold and green books in the shelf and the carved wooden figures of farmers at work and horses and carts and putting them back exactly where they were and would remain.
It was as if time had stood still around her. But the moment she was gone, time had been obliged to run ahead faster to make up for waiting. They’re selling the house and everything in it.
Maybe if my family hadn’t moved away when I was young. Or my mother hadn’t quarreled with her a few years before the end. If I hadn’t been too uncertain of how to reach out to her as an adult on my own. Maybe I could have known her better. Maybe I’d have something of hers to hold.
But ultimately, it’s just so easy. To never see someone again.
I dream of her instead. And her house. In my dreams, her house has many versions. One with a high wall around the back yard. One with extra rooms in the basement. And more. Remarkably stable from dream to dream for all their differences from the original.
Now, that house, which is no longer her house, is a dream version of itself. Emptied out. The carpet is gone and the wood beneath is worn. The furniture she got as a young bride and kept so perfectly has all been removed. But there are still traces. The gold and yellow backsplash my grandfather put in before he passed. Inexplicably, her chenille curtains still hang in her empty bedroom. In her yard, only two of her beloved blue hydrangeas remain. The hedges are scraggly and thin. The apple tree has fallen. The shed is rusty. The clothes line has snapped. How many things fell or broke the Easter morning her heart failed?
Her home, her life had been a bubble, a passage to another time, while the world moved on around her. The neighbors changed. Her old friend down the street died. The houses grew rundown. Her home held back. She held back time. How much older it suddenly looks.
I will never walk there again. In her home. I will never sit in her kitchen eating the popcorn she popped while she smoked cigarette after cigarette and told me stories from her childhood my mother had never heard.
The original is gone. My memory of my grandmother’s home is a dream like the rest.
This story is a part of the TunnelBridge cycle of stories.
Also see TunnelBridge