Walking into the entry of my grandparents’ home, I could feel my shoulders relax. Dropping down with the ease of the coats hooked on the wall. Nothing left to brace. No cold. No pretense. My first glimpse into the rumor of home.
Of course I didn’t have any of those words yet, as I danced beneath the dangling sleeves. Cuffs that smelled like tobacco and earth, brushed across my face. My mother had already made it into the kitchen. But I lingered. Stretching my unmittened hands up and into the damp sleeves. With boots still on, I could slide my feet into my grandpa’s shoes. Almost completely covered in the welcoming. Nearly finished with her first cup of egg coffee, my mother waved me in.
I suppose I’ve always been one to linger. Wanting the moment to last. It’s the 22nd and I want it all to slow down. I’m not ready to jump to the Christmas Day. I want to play the music. Loudly. Softly. I want to finger the wrapping. Nibble at the cookies. Drape myself in the entry of all the magic to come. I can see my mother’s feet in grandma’s kitchen. There’s no need to hurry. I know I am home.
She didn’t want me to bring it, my bicycle. But I begged. There’s no place to ride it, she said. Oh, yes, I’ll find lots of places, I said. Living on a gravel road, my banana seat bike was always dirty. It will ruin the back of the car, she said. I’ll put down a sheet, I said. (I never remember getting new sheets as a kid. I wonder how we always had old ones in the garage.) She finally gave in as I struggled to lay flat the fitted sheet in the back of car.
My grandma was aproned and dishtoweled waiting by the back door. She looked confused when my mother pulled out my bicycle. She simply shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. Balancing it with one handlebar, I waved to my mother as she backed out the driveway.
I jumped onto the back seat, still spinning in my mother’s dust. I road from the barn to the mailbox. The barn to the mailbox. The barn to the mailbox. And then began to wonder what I had begged for. I looked around. There was no sidewalk. No bike path. I wasn’t allowed on the highway. The electric fence gated the field filled with cow pies. Still determined, I laid my bike flat. Grabbed the back ring of the seat. And pulled it under the fence — the handlebar just missing the shock of the wire. I stood it up in the uneven grass. I turned the pedals. Right foot high in the air. I pushed it with all of my weight. The wheels didn’t move. I tipped over. I put it up again. Pushed. Fell. Again. Pushed fell. So distracted by the grass stains forming on my knees, I hadn’t seen grandpa walk up behind me. His hand made stable the seat. I mounted. He lifted the back wheel. The front tire took hold and I was off. I don’t know how far I went before getting stuck again. But he pulled me out. Pushed me off. Again and again. Exhausted, and completely unwilling to admit it, I stopped at the machine shed on the other side of the field. I watched him pick out the tools he needed. I looked back at the house. Then back at him. The thing I remember the most is, he didn’t make me ask. He picked up my bike and secured it on his shoulder. We began walking back to the house.
Do you know what my name means? He asked. Grandpa? No, he said, Hvezda. No, I said. It means Star. That’s nice, I said smiling. Some changed it, he said, when coming to America, they thought it would be easier. It’s easier to spell, I said. He agreed. But you didn’t, I said. Nope, he nodded. I already knew what it meant, he said, and that was enough. I smiled and agreed. Perhaps we both saw the uncertainty (but beauty) of my road ahead.
I don’t know what it is, that makes us choose. That makes us decide on a path. What makes us get up over and over again. Determined, on the uneasiness. But I keep choosing it. Ever hopeful. I guess I know what it means to me. And it does mean something! It means so much! So I will choose it again and again. The silent h and the long v, keep pointing me to the unchartered path. And I still believe.
“I was leaving…to fling myself into the unknown… to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom.” Richard Wright
My painting style keeps evolving. Along with my writing. And why wouldn’t it? With only a pocketful of native seeds, I left my small hometown, for a slightly bigger city. First 60 miles away. Then 120. Then more. And more again. Scattering from field to sidewalk. And picking up more along the way.
My first business card was topped with their name. Then mine below. Smaller. But fitting, I suppose, as I was a mere version of myself. But I wasn’t afraid. It was my grandfather who taught me that everything grows in its time. Its place. He rotated his crops. I didn’t have the words for it then, but here they are now, so elegantly put — my grandfather, he too, was in search of “new and cool rains,” “bend in strange winds,” and the “warmth of other suns.”
I just received my new order of business cards — tiny blossoms of the seeds I have sprinkled here in France. Planted on canvas and in person. This is not my humid soil of youth. It is cracked and dried from centuries old. And I can feel it against my skin as I work my way to the daily sun. But it is warm. And it is my name atop the card. I am becoming more of myself. Embracing (not the promise) but the perhaps of it all — the glorious perhaps of the bloom.
It doesn’t come naturally to me. Not like painting. Or writing. I usually have to get out the manual each time I wind the bobbin. It always makes me laugh because it certainly isn’t written in my grandmother’s voice. After each instruction they are quick to warn that the rules must be followed explicitly or you could ruin the machine. With almost any direction, my grandma was more of a shrugging shoulder “oh, you’ll figure it out” kind of leader.
Not needing to sew every day, I follow the guidelines and the bobbin spins empty. Then I close the book, trace the thread, pump the pedal, tug at the bobbin, pulling it up just a centimeter or so, and it begins to collect thread. It just needed a little Elsie-ing. I smile at her picture that doesn’t guard the machine, but welcomes me, and I continue the conversation, making a much needed (if you know, you know) bed pillow out of an old mini-skirt.
I show you the picture of the pillow now. But what you really need to see is not in the image. More than a pillow, what I really needed yesterday was a break from a slight worry. It’s silly, I know, but I can get caught in a cycle of repeating thoughts that just gain momentum. I suppose we all can. But I know myself.
It was my grandfather who first told me to focus on something else. And my grandma, with never the luxury of needing something else to focus on, shrugged her shoulders in smiling agreement.
Tagged by them both yesterday, I stitched my way back into all the pleasant that surrounds me. The soft comfort of love that pillows me daily — that welcomes me home.
There is a painting that walks ahead of me on the trail. Normally I would be eager to pass these aging men, but my anxious feet are overruled and I slow to take it all in. Maybe it’s the hats. Or the synchronized position of hands clasped behind their backs, heading them “heart-first.”
When I’m close enough for them to hear my graveled steps, I pick up the pace. We exchange smiling bonjours, and the day will continue down different roads. I won’t learn their names, these hatted men. Having been in their path is enough.
Maybe it was a different time, but my grandfather wore a hat. There was something trustworthy about it. Elegant, even in overalls. I trusted it — him. I suppose that’s why I trust it still. Because what’s taught is what’s known. And maybe that’s what empathy is, what humanity is, walking in the path of others, heart-first.
“If wishes were fishes, we’d all be in the brook.” If she said it once, she said it a million times, enough to fill a brook, I suppose. We’d pull at her apron. Wishing we had this certain candy, when the lazy susan of the corner cupboard was full of sugary treats. Wishing we had the newest game, when an endless adventure waited for us in a yard filled with apple trees and cow gazes. We sucked in our cheeks, breathing like fish, filled our pockets with Sugar Daddies and Sugar Babies and swam out into the summer sun.
Not truly knowing what it meant, I think we wished around her, simply to play our own fish game. As she sent us off with this string of words, we would swim for hours in a wheat field. On a gravel road. And this was one of the greatest gifts we received — the gentle shove out gratitude’s door into all that we had!
It still makes me laugh sometimes. I say under my own breath, puffing my frustrated lips, keeping my teeth clenched, “Well, I wish I had… then, I’d be… and the words puff from my angry mouth, and it sounds something like a fish. I shake my head, and realize how silly, stupid really. Then I swim through my list of everything I have, buoyant once again.
It’s so easy to get caught up in what we don’t have, and the crazy thing is, that only takes us away from the wonders that we do. I can still hear her voice as I head out this morning’s door. I am ever thankful.
I can’t say I ever thought of them decorating, let alone decorating together. The thought of them having that conversation seems ridiculous. Maybe he said “Elsie, I’m going to put a giant rock at the end of the driveway.” And maybe she said, “mmm-hmmm,” with a slight turn of the head while watching the Hortons on Days of Our Lives. And maybe when she drove by the first time she wondered, “What’s that rock doing here?” while eating the last of her toasted marshmallows out of the Jerry’s Jack and Jill bag.
They must have had conversations alone. But of course that would have been impossible to see. There were too many of us. With nine children, 27 grandchildren and growing, was there time to talk about the rhubarb? Maybe she said, “I’ll make a pie later.” And maybe he puffed an, “mmm-hmm,” through the stem of his pipe. And maybe he asked about dessert the next evening, as she rolled her eyes in the scent of the rhubarb that wafted through the kitchen.
Maybe it’s silly to imagine now, but I like thinking of them as people, not just as grandparents. It’s hard when you’re in the middle of it — standing on a rock, or eating a pie, but they were people. People who loved and laughed and worried and cried and wondered and hoped. People who got tired and excited. People who wrote down the price of grain and checked the weather report and went to the doctor. At the end of the day, people who called each other by name, and not by title.
We can’t know everything about everyone, even the ones we love the most. But we can love them still. Maybe even more. Knowing we all have these lives filled with things we’ll never see. Reasons why we do the things we do. Live the way we live.
If we can allow people to be people. See them somewhere between the rock and the rhubarb. And just love them…
Besides fields of grain, my grandfather had cows. And while he taught me many life lessons, the actual day to day farming, how the cows got from one field to the next, into the barn, I really have no idea. But it’s possible the instincts were not lost on me, as I have the continuous desire to corral my make-up, shower products, and various items on the coffee table.
It’s hard to explain the satisfaction if you are not of like mind. But if you are straightening your mouse pad as you read this, cornering your books, gathering pens in a holder, then you know. Some might argue that it’s a “control thing.” Maybe, but I think, for me, it’s more of a coming together, a calmness, a peace. No competition of chaos and clutter.
When I walk into our library, my joyful heart exhales. The details of art, books, music and plants, down to the Paris Review on the footstool I made from a stump in our garden — they make me, I want to say happy, but that’s not exactly right. It’s more than that. I am corralled in all that I love. It is a calm and safe place where my heart can rest, and my mind can wander. I suppose that’s home, isn’t it?
I love to roam the fields. Walk. Run. Fly even, in the yet to be traveled. In the unknown. And maybe that’s only possible because of the safety (disguised as love) that I was given first from an earth-roughened heart, on a farm just outside of Alexandria, Minnesota — one that rests me still in the south of France.
If the truth has to come at you like a ton of bricks, maybe it really isn’t the truth at all.
Grandpa Rueben didn’t say a lot, but when he did, we believed him. He was one of the hardest working people I ever knew, (other than Grandma Elsie), yet I never saw him labor with the facts. There was a quiet certainty that rose from his overalls. His right elbow raised from the table. His open hand began with the slightest of beats. Like a conductor, his rhythm held our eyes. Chosen carefully, the words, without fuss or fury, slipped into our hearts and minds and filled them.
I suppose that’s why today, if it comes at me too hard, I can’t let it in. It’s only noise. There are some who think if you say it loud enough, repeat it again and again, then it must be true. I still am of the belief that the real work has to remain in the fields. The truth, when balanced on the uneven legs of the kitchen table at day’s end, should come lightly, easily, ever without harm.
It only just occurred to me — they often say before you speak, take a beat. I smile. I see Grandpa’s hand gently keeping time, and my heart knows what’s real.
Some say it originated in the Bible. Others will say it came from Viking lore. Even Shakespeare has been given credit. But for me, I know exactly the first time I heard it, this saying — “…a little birdie told me…” — it was on the party line that I wasn’t supposed to be listening to, perched (not unlike a bird ironically) on my grandfather’s chair made out of an old tractor seat underneath the kitchen telephone. My grandma was talking to one of the neighbors about one of the other neighbors. I held my chubby hand over the mouthpiece, but my gasp was still audible when the neighboring party said, “Well, a little birdie told me…” I could hear my grandma both through the line and through the house – “hang up.” I did. And ran through the screen door in search of the talking birds.
The thing is, I couldn’t ask where these special birds were, because that would be admitting to the eavesdropping, so I had to wander the farm on my own. Tree by tree. I could hear them all right, but what were they saying? I climbed each apple tree to get a closer listen. I jumped, nearly falling off the branch when my grandpa asked what I was doing. “Listening to the birds,” I said. “But I don’t know what they’re saying.” He shook his head. “Do you understand them?” I asked. He shook his head yes. I exhaled. Deflated. “What do they say?” I asked him. “Whatever I need to hear,” he smiled and walked back to the barn.
To this day, it’s not about gossip, or telling tales, it’s about listening. Sure, some will say well it’s just your heart, your head, your soul, and maybe it’s true, but I hear them, the birds, while I’m walking, anywhere in this world. They always tell me whatever I need to hear. Telling me that everything is going to be ok, great even…and hand uncovering the mouthpiece, I thank them, and tell them, “I know.”
If you ask, ” How come you’re always going on about your grandfather? What did he give you that was so great?” “Wings,” I say, “He gave me wings.”
