Worlds Apart

I have my Grandma Curtis's forehead wrinkles and bad eyesight.  I know this because I have seen a close-up photo of her from sometime in the late 60's.  I know it's the late 60's because the picture is in color and because she died in 1970, when my mother was pregnant with me.  My Grandpa Curtis is in the photo too, and he died in October of 1969.  Even though I never knew them, I grew up with them all around me.  We lived in their house with the flowers my grandmother planted still popping up, every year, all over the yard.

I knew from the time I was a small girl that my grandmother loved flowers.  They were everywhere.  Pink and white striped flowers lined the concrete walkway up to the steps, daffodils popped up here and there every spring.  There were rose bushes and Forsythia bushes and other smelly, flowering bushes that no one ever learned the names of.  They were little parts of her colorful spirit that lingered all around us long after she was gone.

All my life I've felt a kind of kinship with this woman I never knew.  I was told stories of her love of the outdoors; how, if the weather was warm, she preferred working outside in the flowers to doing housework. I know she was a creative soul.  She had a room of the house set aside just for quilting. My mother told me about it many times when she would remember my grandmother's death and the way she and my aunts had to go in and clean up all the quilting materials that were strewn everywhere in that room.  For a while when I was growing up, that room became mine.  Now it is a front porch.

My grandmother played the accordion.  I've always tried to imagine her lively and with great enthusiasm pumping out a tune or two, but I really don't know what kind of music she played.  I like to think that it was her love of music that encouraged my dad and his brothers to learn to play guitar. In that way, she gave me memories of music with my family that I'll always treasure.

I know she was a good cook.  In fact, my mother used to say that if Grandma Curtis hadn't been around she wouldn't have learned to cook at all. "I couldn't boil water when we first got married," my mother would say. "So your Grandma Curtis had to teach me everything."  In fact, Grandma knew my mother couldn't cook and it worried her.

My dad's memory is fading.  Tonight I told him a story that my mother told me a dozen times, about how when my parents first got married and got their own little house, my grandma sent my uncles over while they were gone and had them move all my parents' things out and into her own house.  She was afraid my mother wouldn't be able to take care of my dad.  He didn't remember this happening at all but he didn't question it.  A big smile came over his face, his cheeks turning red the way they do every time he laughs.  "I don't remember that, but it sure sounds like something my Mama would have done. She didn't want any of her boys leaving home!"

Obstinate.  Determined.  Pig-headed even.  That's what she was, and here I've been, all my life measuring myself against her memory.  I look at the picture of her in her cat-eye glasses, the same swirl of wrinkles on her forehead that I see more and  more every day in my own.  I study her smile, her hairline, the fullness of her lips and the shape of her eyes and I see some of me in there.  I see a lot of me, actually.  I see a lot of me in all the little things, both good and questionable, that I know about this woman I've never known.

In a way, the familiar comfort I've always felt with her gives me some peace.  It reminds me that long after my life is over, little bits and pieces of what I have put into the world will continue on.  It is the mystery and hopefulness of family, of legacy and legend that seems to keep the wheels of life turning.  I just hope that I can leave more good in the world than bad.  I hope I am planting seeds that will continue to bloom and grow into beautiful things someday, even once I'm too far removed from this world to enjoy them anymore.  I hope my children will know, even when they are 81, how fiercely I have loved them.  I hope someone will have a song stuck in his head because I passed the love of music down the line.  I hope someone out there will be creating lovely things, making messes, choosing to play outside instead of working inside, cooking big tasty meals out of cheap home-grown food and stubbornly refusing to ever give up on what she wants because I lived that kind of life before her.

I was always told that my grandma died of a broken heart. Everyone told me she grieved herself to death after the sudden death of my grandpa.  They died only a few months apart, him in the fall, and her the following February.  There is another picture somewhere that was taken at her graveside.  In it, my sister is about five years old.  She is sitting in the foreground looking sad and uncertain with a couple of my cousins beside her. In the background, the profiles of two pregnant women stand behind them. I think one of those women is my aunt Lib.  The other is my mother.

I don't know what it would be like to love a man so much that my own spirit would perish if I lost him. I know what it is like to love and I know what it is like to lose.  I even know what it is like to lose myself in someone else, but I don't think I'll ever know the kind of love that transcends time and space. I don't think I will ever be lucky enough to make that kind of connection with another human being who doesn't share my DNA.  It seems so foreign to me.  This concept, this reality that was my grandmothers will never be mine.  In all my searching for where she and I reach our divide, this most unfortunate place is where I find it.  The chasm that puts me worlds away from the wholeness of who she was lies vast and wide between us, the echo of my own voice calling back to me across time, wondering if I've taken that obstinate, pig-headedness of hers a step too far this time.