My Grandfather Part 1

My grandparents had a wonderful house for children and my brother and I spent most weekends of our childhood there. The kitchen was large, warm and homey, yet in the corner was the requisite portal of whispered unknown terrors only flimsily barred by a mere door to the basement. They had an attic that had nooks and crannies and held my grandfather’s oil painting supplies. They had another attic room across the hallway that was my father’s growing up and had a window out of which you could climb onto the roof and see the Vashon Island ferries float silently like wooden clouds upon the sea. And they had a long, wide porch that was my nemesis for it was tilted, rather significantly, down and away from the house painted a glossy enamel gray. When I was strapped in for battle in my new Easter shoes, especially extra slicked by manufacturing people who disliked small girls, I had to scramble like Edmund Hillary to get to the front door and hold on to stay there while being chided to “Smile, dear”. I wonder if Sir Hillary would have been such a success if he’d had to wear new little girl party shoes? I may have been the finest undiscovered mountain climber ever! Oh, the talents nobody knew I had! But I will not mourn them here…

Because this is a piece about my grandfather, my father’s father, honoring a man whom I have discovered I never knew very deeply though I could not have loved him more. He died when I was in college, in fact my best friend of then 13, now 55, years came to find me to tell me the heart emptying news, as I then, as I now, am never near a phone.

I spoke of their house, which was a haven of mysterious objects such as woven baskets from Shanghai, pieces of silk and carved carnelian beads, fans and photographs of strangers with no color. Against one side of the living room wall there was long low green chesterfield with a quilted copper satin comforter under which each evening I would happily crawl anticipating its cool slipperiness and faithfully watch Perry Mason with my grandmother. I still hear the theme song and think it’s my bedtime. But it was their garden that captured and held on to me tightest.

To me, it lay as a vast park-like space with many leafy rooms to explore and be lost in. Voluminous hydrangeas billowed out from under the bedroom windows and greeted you when you first spied the house. There was a grassy more formal space with a round rose bed that my grandfather dug and double dug and tended with great love, bringing heavily raspberry scented blossoms inside for my grandmother’s vases. It was separated from the rest of the garden by what seemed to me a high hedge of boxwood. I loved that hedge. When it rained, which was often, as I was ushered from driveway to path to house with my child’s suitcase, I’d pause for ages finding tiny cups of thin green holding even tinier silver raindrops. My immense joy was to make these cups into caps for my four-year-old fingertips delighting in their perfect fit. Adorning my hands with these hats was a pastime I never tired of, in fact I do it still when I am near boxwood, it comforts me for a moment and makes me smile.

But this isn’t about me; it’s about my grandfather!

As I have given thought to what I might write about him, I have come to see that my grandfather was an influential presence in my life though he was not a prominent participant. In my memory he is inseparable from his garden chores, tending an eternally smoldering pile of debris that smelled of damp wood and ashes. Beyond his rose garden and my best friend the hedge, there were fruit trees, a woodland of apples, pears and dark European plums filled with juice and bees once they’d fallen and bruised. Dragging up my crayons and paper and not being overly athletic, once I had gained my roost in his trees I tended to linger and dream there. Recalling the effort required to climb and hold onto my needed essentials it is clear to me now, that were there to be such a thing, I would never have made it past the Mt. Everest parking lot; rest easy, Edmund. Anyway, it was a greenland of benevolent homelike trunks that I pottered through singing my made up baby songs and conversing continuously with the concrete set of mama and baby ducks that were my beloved companions. I carried those ducks everywhere, singly by the neck for they were chubby weighty friends. I loved them and would set them in new venues around the garden but always near where my grandfather toiled because I loved him just that little bit more. When I had my own children I bought them a set of ducks but it wasn’t the same and I must confess that I laid that guilt at their webbed feet and held it against them a bit.

But this isn’t about me; it’s about my grandfather.

He smelled of cherry pipe tobacco and gave me cheddar cheese when dinner seemed too far away. He taught me to plant bulbs pointy end up, to rest on a spade while watching the sky, to move earthworms rather than leaving them drown in the runoff from the rainy times. He taught me the great beauty to be found in the shades of our weather and the peace to be found in a garden when others would stay dry indoors. This was the grandfather I knew and loved greatly. This is the man that I miss.

But there was an enormous amount of the man about whom I had no inkling.
I will share that man anon.