Have you ever been to Ohio? It's a good place to live, really.
Nice people, four seasons, and you can buy a three-story house for under $120,000.
But sometimes we watch TV and see all the other places we could live.
Beautiful villages in France,
a house perched on a rolling hill in Tuscany,
two-story courtyards tucked within grand walls in Spain,
and we mutter, half to ourselves and half to the universe of wishful thinking, Let's move to Europe.
Then we look at Jane and think of our families, almost all within an hour's distance,
and know we could never move.
and know we could never move.
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| {Our family. Photo by Suzuran Photography} |
My mother's parents and my father's mother were all gone by the time I came to town, and I don't remember my father's father. I hear stories about them. I grill my parents for memories. I savor every detail.
My mother's mother was funny and wanted to be a cartoonist.
She liked to take things apart and put them back together.
When she was a young woman, she had a dog named Buster.
Her brother and sister eloped on the same night without the other one knowing about it.
She woke my mother and aunt up every morning with a cup of hot tea.
She smelled like Coco Chanel perfume.
One of the only pictures I've seen of her is her senior portrait. My mother has her smile and her eyes.
My father's mother baked bread every week for her five sons.
She sewed slipcovers for the couch in heavy fabric.
Her parents were farmers and she was one of three girls.
In her senior picture, she looks serious and lovely.
She had auburn hair and blue eyes.
My sister Wendy bears a striking resemblance.
Mom's dad was handsome, with blonde hair and green eyes.
He washed the windows every week with newspaper and vinegar.
In World War II, he served in Italy and France as a driver for the General.
He got a letter from Grandma every day while at war;
he threw all her letters away because he couldn't read her writing.
He had a dry sense of humor.
His mother's name was Clara; she took my mother and aunt shopping every weekend.
My father's father had thick, dark, wavy hair.
In a photograph of him in the Navy, he wears a smirk that reminds me of Frank Sinatra.
He was a talented gardener. Dad remembers going outside to pick vegetables to make dinner.
My cousin told me that once while visiting with Grandpa, she woke up early and found him in the kitchen.
He was working on a crossword puzzle (in ink) and made her a breakfast of blueberries with sugar.
Don't tell your dad I gave you this for breakfast, he told her.
He was a semester shy of becoming a veterinarian.
These stories put together a lovely but incomplete impression about who my grandparents were.
I wish I could have met these familiar strangers.
In Ohio, full of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, Jane can do that.
And memories are better than stories.
And memories are better than stories.
