Swonderings

From W@H:Tell about the place you think of as home from your childhood. What did it look like? What smells remind you of home? What memories does "home" evoke for you?

I love this question. :) Home to me is my grandmothers house in Maine. My family moved around to one tiny house or trailer after another, but my grandmothers house was always home. Sometimes we stayed there for a few months at a time, and my brothers and cousins and I often stayed there for weeks in the summertime. Picture driving down a winding dirt road with trees brushing the road on either side. You come into a clearing and you see the tall pines in front of the apple orchard, and beyond, the house. You park across the road in front of the greenhouse. I say "road", but path would be more accurate, as all that is beyond my grandparents land on that dead end road are a very small sawmill and treetapping trails. From where you park you can see the big garden, cornstalks waving in the breeze and flowers winking at you from the front of the rich dirt expanse. Beyond the garden, you can just make out the first scrubby blueberry bushes on the top of the hill. They go down to the bottom of the hill, and you smile in reminiscence of warm, sweaty mornings swinging a little blueberry rake and scooping up hundreds of the things. Of course, while you're reminiscing, you think of all the time spent in the garden, painstakingly picking weeds or measuring seed troughs and planting under the scrutinizing gaze of the workhorse that is "Grampy." Yes, those fateful words, spoken in a thick Maine burr "Ah got a job foa ya'" were all too often the start of one of those mornings of backbreaking labor in the hopes of a quarter for all the hard work. Grandchildren, to my veteran workaholic retired grandfather, meant free slave labor, but it was always rewarding to feel so useful. I still wonder at how my cousins and brothers and I used to fight over who got the honor of unlacing Grampy's boots when we came in for lunch after a hard mornings' work getting all dirty. But, back to the path. Turning from the blueberry bushes and the garden, you cross the road and can see the barn in the distance. Grampy's rusty old red tractor is just peeking from the barn door. The potato fields in the distance bring back another flood of childhood memories, hauling rocks from the furrows into buckets and dragging them over to the truck to be put on the rock pile, or later in the season bent down by potato plants, and picking off those peculiar little creatures called potato bugs into a coffee can of turpentine. My grandfather was always exacting in his calculations, and sometimes would judiciously declare that we would get a penny for each bug in our can. Of course, this entailed my poor grandmother having to individually count each little bug from all seven cans of her grandchildrens' picking. Turning from the barn, you see the house. A great big old Maine farm house, with five bedrooms, a big screened in porch in the back and a huge fireplace. That house holds so many sweet memories for me. Of sitting in the rocking chair with my grandmother reading stories, of playing hide and seek in all the many nooks, crannies, closets and cupboards that the house contained, of sneaking down the living room stairs at night, shushing each other and watching the TV from the top step while my grandfather clicked through the channels and my grandmother dozed off and on next to him, knitting for a bit when she awoke. I remember hauling wood for the woodbox every afternoon when I was a teenager and had just walked home in the snow from the little Christian school down the road that I finished high school in. I remember playing dress-up with my cousins with my great grandmothers' costume jewelry, then having a fashion show with my grandmother oohing and aahing as we descended the stairs in heels too big for us, and gaudy peach pearls with our chiffon covered dresses and feathered hats. I remember birthday parties on the porch, when the great big wooden table was covered with my grandmothers faded Happy Birthday tablecloth and balloons taped to the chair at the head of the table. My brothers and I all have summer birthdays and always looked forward to celebrating out on the big porch, with mosquitoes buzzing outside the screens and the wind blowing through the trees beyond, with the smell of lilacs drifting up from the side of the house. Often, on summer days, after a morning of helping Grampy in whatever task he had for us, we would wolf down a quick lunch and Nanny would walk us down to the river, following the path down through the woods under the green metal bridge overhead. The water is always cold in the Little Wilson, but that never stopped us from splashing and swimming and enjoying ourselves to the utmost. Swimming in the Wilson, however always paled in comparison to going "up to camp" and swimming in Greenwood Pond. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I realized the oddity of calling that lake a pond, but no one ever thought anything of it. My older brother and I would race to swim across, quite a feat that left the dock we started at barely in sight and always had my mother yelling for us to come back. I'm sure I spent more hours swimming and canoeing in that water than doing anything else in the summertime when I was a child, or at least that's what my mind has held onto. I loved to canoe out to the edges of the water and listen to the loon's song, especially at almost dusk, when the sun is just starting to turn the water pale orange and the breezes are getting a bit cooler. That's when we would go in to shore, dry off and put on one of Nanny's spare flannel shirts and wait, stomach's growling for one of Grampy's famous hamburgers, followed by marshmallows toasted at the fire pit by the dock. Of course, from the dock, from the water, from anywhere on Greenwood Pond, you were in sight of Borestone Mountain. That's another inaccurately named landmark. I say Mountain, but you could climb it in the space of a long morning and have lunch on the peak. When I close my eyes, I can see those familiar trails and trees going up Borestone. It's been three years since I have climbed those trails. Maybe the next time I go, my son can climb beside me. This sleepy little town called Willimantic, not even on most maps, where my grandmother lived was the home of so many of my sweet memories of childhood.

I long for that place of peace, swinging on the hammock looking through the trees at Greenwood, or feeling the heat from the fireplace in my grandparents living room as snow falls silently outside the big picture window. My grandparents are selling the house soon. It breaks my heart for it to not be there for me to come home to, but I guess the memories are etched upon heart indelibly, even if I never get to eat my grandfathers' maple syrup on waffles on a Sunday night in the kitchen in that house again, even if I never get to have another birthday celebration on the porch in the breeze, even if I never get to sneak down the stairs and steal candy canes from the Christmas tree and gaze into that fireplace again.