13 Kelwyn

13 Kelwyn

I parked my car in the street to keep it out of frame, and immediately could tell the neighbors were watching. I strode into the road – a short dead end jutting from a cul-de-sac, and snapped one picture of the small white ranch with its black shingle roof. The evergreen and mailbox just barely obscured the living room window, it’s gauzy curtains, and the stories held in the room behind them. The single car driveway, my sister’s car squarely placed, and the wheelchair ramp installed just a few years ago sat just out of frame. I circled the house, leaning and positioning myself just so, capturing the views from memories of my own and others. In a way, this sequence of photographs felt as though I was documenting the change of hands, the continuation of family in this home, not unlike photographing its interior and all my grandmother has left there.

I looked up and caught a glimpse of the neighbors across the street. In most cases, this may be uncomfortable, to say the least. But these neighbors in question, however, are close family friends – Pam and Gary and Brenda have been part of our family’s story since before my father was born and grew up in that house. They’ve intimately seen the entire sequence our family is experiencing. I know them, they know me, and Brenda’s nod of understanding from her living room window meant more than I can say. Her late husband, a photographer, was fond of documenting change in unexpected places. Brenda knows the process well.

***

I stopped at my parent’s house to drop off something of minimal importance at my mother’s request. I needed to get out of my apartment anyway, needing a breath away from the never-ending schoolwork.

My father stopped me in the doorway as I entered. “So! How much time you got?” Well, the whole afternoon. “Good! Come look!”

We leaned over the kitchen table – both of us too stubborn to sit – and combed through documents from the home that was my grandmother’s and is now my sister’s. These papers, yellowing with age, some of them crinkled, one folded into a post-it size square evidently some time ago, emerged from boxes we did not know existed until their unexpected discovery in the laundry room.

The cleaning out of the house produced a number of surprise discoveries, namely items in places they would not normally be kept. A small orange pill bottle full of thumbtacks in the medicine cabinet, birthday cards in the kitchen cupboard, a metal colander under the bed – she had a reason for each of these, but a reason unbeknownst to us, and by then to her as well. Whispers of concern were exchanged over what this may mean for legal documents, for the deed to the house, for the wedding ring with its diamond passed on through generations. My dad and his siblings stepped in, and Mémère agreed that it was best for her to not be living on her own.

My sister closed on the house in the early fall, following a spring and summer of the family taking stock of what Mémère had, and who wished to lay claim to what. Everything left stayed in the house, included above the dotted line.

And so we combed through the sprawled contents of the boxes, a varied and variegated heap on my parent’s kitchen table, surrounded by folders slowly being filled with documents of all shapes and ages, setting aside the occasional heirloom trinket.

***

I pulled into the driveway and parked behind her car – the light had taken forever to turn, so perhaps I sped a bit too quickly down this meek dead-end neighborhood off the main through-way – and held my breath before reaching for my camera bag. The same door faced me, the same curtains laced the windows, fluttering in the breeze of the fan she perpetually kept on. I knocked three sets of two raps, my usual to say it’s me, and my sister swung it open immediately. A slight laugh, and she smiled – “Took you long enough, I’m already making dinner.” I tossed a raised eyebrow and shook my head, “Well, thanks for letting me invade your home… again.”

Three cardboard boxes sat in the corner of the living room, heaped with all that once graced the laundry room down the hall. Mémère’s baubles and bits of ephemera and memoriam that lined the top of the bookcase now piled unceremoniously into a box. The shrine to the Holy Family, its porcelain statuettes of Mary and Joseph, the blonde wood crucifix, the candles, the practical plastic bottle in which Mémère kept her holy water, all sat in a cardboard box on the floor, adjacent to a laptop charger and a yet-to-be-unpackaged printer. I guess I hesitated for a moment too long, staring blankly at the vestiges in a box on the floor, wondering where her collection of rosaries went – “All good?” my sister asked from a mere step to my right. I hadn’t noticed she was there.

Poor composition. Unfocused. Underexposed. I could not reign in control of my camera. The grip felt unwieldy, my palms were too clammy and hands too shaky and eyes too fluttering to focus on constructing an image worth taking. The wallpaper remained the same as last time, the pale maple hardwood floor still reflected warm evening light from the two windows with their buttery linen valences. The bookshelf was empty, as I expected, its top barren. On the tabletop against the wall, on which Mémère had her shrine to the Holy Family, where since Pépère died she had kept his dog eared and marked and worn leatherbound New Testament reader, now sat a small stack of file folders. The new desk sat against the far wall, the rocking chair had been moved to the basement, and a filing cabinet replaced what was once a side table stuffed with embroidery threads and spare hoops. A house becomes a home when it finally fits its residents, and this resident needs an office more than a sewing room and a shrine.

***

My phone buzzes in my lap as I sit in a meeting with my boss, scheduling my next few weeks of work. I whisper shit a little too loud, and she looks up – “everything ok?” I laugh it off, “Oh, yeah, just a text from my mom. I’ll check it later.”

I get back to my car just a bit mentally drained, and tap open the message. Guess who we saw!

A picture. A smiling face, a fluff of white hair, her silver framed glasses, the tan house coat she wore when she got a bit cold despite the thermostat at seventy-five, a floral blouse in her favorite shade of purple that comprised a good third of her closet, Mémère stands in her room at the care home. Her glider rocking chair sits tucked next to her bed, the quilt from home is draped over the back and cushion. One of her rosaries lays on the side table, just barely in frame, with her spare glasses, a glass of water, and her bible. But the white walls hum with a clinical intensity, the linoleum tile floors reflect no warmth. It is her room, but the room is not her. And she stands with her arm linked with my dad’s, and he leans into her shoulder, holding her steady, both of them with beaming smiles. Dad’s eyes are red, his cheeks a bit damp.

My breath catches in my throat, my hand instinctively covering my mouth in surprise. All I can think to reply is simply You got to see her!

I open the picture again. It’s been over a year since she’s had any visitors – the care home had closed visitation for health concerns in the face of the pandemic. They kept the memory care center closed for a bit longer, as the residents couldn’t quite grasp the precautions and protocols.

A new message buzzes. Yes, they’re starting to open visitation. Two visitors at a time, so we can’t go all at once and you have to schedule it. Your dad wants to take you soon!

Over a year since I have seen her. Over six months that I have been just four miles away but unable to visit, unable to tell her that I’m here, that I’m not gone, that I love her. Over a year since I’ve sat with her as she tells me a story and goes on about her friends I don’t remember or people I’ve never met but she speaks of as though I’ve seen them daily for decades. Over a year since I’ve held her hand and thought of the love and care and intention she has put into everything she has made in her kitchen and sewing room in that small white ranch with its black shingle roof on a short dead end jutting from a cul-de-sac. Over a year since I’ve known if she still knows me.

Another message from my mom.

She remembered your dad as he walked in the door.

Hermit Cookies

Hermit Cookies

I paced that aisle at least a half dozen times, scanning the shelves for the very specific jar. Yellow label, brown and black text, a woman’s cameo within the central image. Her white puff of hair and wire-framed glasses always seemed comforting, maybe because they’re so much like Mémère’s. On my sixth or seventh trip down the aisle I spot the molasses, hidden among the Karo and cane sugar syrup, just above the raisins. The one with the rabbit is front and center, the plastic bottle of black strap molasses tucked to the side. But no Grandma’s, not even a space for it. That jar had always sat ubiquitously in the lower right corner of Mémère’s cabinet above the oven – her baking staples. Molasses (as she believed any self-respecting French Canadian grandmother would have), brown sugar, chopped nuts, flours, spices, candied fruits, and the sturdiest set of cake pans I’ve ever laid eyes on. Well-seasoned, well loved, and never in neglect – the spices never had time to go stale, the tins and trays never had time to collect dust.

The counterspace of my tiny first apartment kitchen is barely enough to place everything I needed. Parchment on the cookie sheets, I set the oven to 365 – Mémère notes to bake them at 350, but my oven, like my hands, runs cold. It’s a blessing when working pastry and candy, a curse in most other cases. The cabinet door clangs shut after I grab the flat-bottom Pyrex dishes I elected as mixing bowls – Mémère’s of course, snagged from her kitchen when my sister bought her house. It was all so sudden when she moved into Riverside. Mémère moved a year ago, and my father and his siblings began the process of cleaning, organizing, removing what was deemed unneeded. My sister closed on the house in the following autumn, and began the process of making it her own. I laid claim to photo albums, trinkets with meaning, and bakeware. Because in a way, her recipes on her cookie sheets by my hands is almost like when she was teaching me. Almost.

Riverside called my father and his siblings almost simultaneously to tell them a room was available. “When can she move in?” “Oh, oh ok. How much of her things from home can she have?”

My mother found the recipe in the pile of things we believe were Nonnie’s, my father’s father’s mother. It’s a bit of a mystery how the recipe came through her hands to her daughter-in-law – Nonnie didn’t bake, or cook much at all. And yet my grandfather became a chef, professionally trained and gainfully employed by hotels, camps, the US Army. My grandmother, though, was a cook. A family cook, a baker, a devotee of the craft of producing warmth in the hearts of those you love. Eyes barely above the counter, I watched countless batches of baked goods, cookies, delicate and splendid cakes and pies slide out of the oven and onto the cooling racks. She produced miracles of confection in such a small kitchen, the dining table serving as base camp and workbench to the elaborate processes applied to her stores of sugar and chocolate. Butter caramels, divinity fudge, coconut peaks, molasses sugar cookies, hermits, whoopie pies, cherry cordials, and mint cremes all graced the white paper boxes of her Christmas delicacies. And I wish I had paid more attention.

I cream the sugar, shortening, and molasses. I add the vanilla and eggs, cracked one handed just as she taught me. The whirr of the hand mixer covers my mumbles as I talk myself through the recipe, reciting her lessons and instructions as I go.

Christmas Eve makes one year of her residence at the memory care home, ever so indelicately labelled as the county rest home’s dementia ward. For the first few months, she opened every visit with a request to go home. She missed her sewing room, she missed her kitchen. Over time, home changed location. From Kelwyn Park, her home since 1963 where she and Pépère built their family, to Williams Street, where she spent her childhood. Misplacement of hearing aids and glasses has become commonplace, her sleep no longer follows any pattern. Names of family members and friends transpose, relational identities are replaced simply with “Oh, piton, I know you, right?” Details long set aside return into prominence with utter specificity and unforeseen application. Prices of garments bought decades ago, the location of a childhood friend’s home, and tasks desired to be completed in her young adult life all arrive with an urgency placed atop the inability to address such information. And yet she no longer understands why she cannot do something about it.

When I packed my bags and moved to Germany for the summer, I knew she likely would not recognize me upon return. I tried to brace for it. I don’t believe anyone in the family could have assumed my last visit before departure would have been the last time I’ve seen her face to face. Two weeks into my foreign residence, my mother informed me Riverside was suspending in-person visitations, for safety in the face of the pandemic. Their hope was for only a few weeks, possibly a couple months if necessary. It has been a year. I have been here, in my hometown, just six miles from her, for months, and yet I cannot see her. Yet I know, despite the slips in verbiage which I may have viscerally reacted against when produced from a family member’s lips, she is not past-tense. She is still here, still there, yet just out of reach.

Hermit cookies, when pulled out of the oven, should be browning around the edges and polished across the top, with a soft center. This can be achieved by rotating your baking sheets halfway through your baking time, just as Mémère directed me to do when first instructing me on the recipe. She trusted me at such a young age to have conviction in my actions. I spooned the flour into the measuring cup, don’t just scoop, it’ll pack too tight. I added dry into wet, one third at a time. It’s ok to taste test as you go, but only a little bit, so I do. She let me make the measurements. She let me choose to add more cinnamon than the recipe stated – or at least as she wrote down from memory. She taught me, a young child of five or six years, to trust my decisions. I mixed the dough only until combined, you don’t want a tough cookie. And I trusted myself in making hermit cookies alone, making them without her guidance, without her knowledge that I am making them. Had this been any other time, any other year, I would be bringing her samples from the batch as soon as they were cooled enough to wrap in foil and transport. I would be asking for feedback, constructive critique, on taste, texture, technique. I would be asking how she learned the recipe, how she learned to bake, how she found food to be a presentation of her love for her family. I would be thanking her, in person, with a hug, a kiss, holding her hand as we discuss the minutia of the recipe that is our family’s lineage leading to where we are now. I would be thinking about recording these conversations, documenting this history, before it’s too late, before it’s gone. And yet this is not any other time; this is the world as I know it at present.

I drove with my parents and my sister to Riverside, invited by the nurses to decorate a Christmas tree. The tree is outside, of course, in this pandemic age, but placed to be seen from Mémère’s room. Informed by her nurse that her family was here to decorate a Christmas tree, Mémère stood in her window watching us. She stood puzzled and bewildered for a moment, I don’t believe quite grasping the occasion. We moved about swiftly as she watched her youngest son, his wife, her only grandson, and her youngest granddaughter decorate a fake tree in silver and gold and fake poinsettias and tinsel and sparkling angels and all her favorite bits of Christmas. I stopped at one point, looking up to her second-story window, her fluff of white hair and silver-framed glasses peering down to me. I took off my pandemic-mandatory face mask, smiled and waved, and blew a kiss. She waved her hands, beckoning we come inside to visit. My sister placed the angel topper, and I tied around the ribbon and tag labelling the tree as for her.

As we pulled away, she stood in the window and watched us leave, waving as she always had from her front steps as a visitor backed out of the driveway. “Well, that was actually pretty fun!” my mother posited in an attempt to lift the mood. “I’m glad they’re doing these things for the residents… even though they can’t have visitors, it’s at least something for Christmas.” I wasn’t quite sure how we would break the following silence, until she continued – “She may be sad to see us go, but she might not have even known who it was decorating the tree. And in twenty minutes she’ll look out her window and think Oh! Someone left me a Christmas tree, it even has my name on it!” I fiddled with the small stack of hermit cookies in my hands, three palm-sized treats wrapped in foil, and swallowed the lump in my throat. My cold hands squeezed the packaging just a little bit tighter, attempting, idly, against the odds, to prevent the cookies from going stale. To have them for just a bit longer.

Storyteller

Storyteller

My grandmother sat in her glider rocking chair, it’s blonde wood smoothed and softened over its years, and held my hand while I sat on the couch to her right. My small hands were restless, but she never seemed to mind – her thoughts were elsewhere, parsing through details and weaving the stories she told me of our lineage. The stories came in parts and sagas, a whirlwind of characters and locations and eras, farming hamlets of the North Country, trailblazing mountaineers, flits of Quebecois French sliding in and out of her phrasing. I sat and listened intently to Mémère’s stories, awestruck by the records of knowledge she held of our family, a narrative of lives all occurring before mine.

In time, I found myself trying on the role. In telling a story, I was no longer myself, but a character to build and create as I saw fit. My experiences, my identity, my insecurity, all faded into the background, blended into an idealized narrative so carefully pieced together. Stories drew a listener’s attention into the details, away from me. I built a wall of fiction, hiding behind its thickly woven timelines and experiences, forging a character I felt to be more fitting of attention than myself. Think about me, and you think of my stories, not about my shorts that were always too long as a size accommodation for my waist, my fingernails anxiously bitten until they bled, my broken and dismantled speech patterns which incessantly resisted rectification.

My mother’s ability to decode my verbal encryptions was unlike anyone else’s, leaving my father, sister, and grandmother all trailing behind her sizable lead. While I was tucked into bed, Mom usually led me in reciting our sentences, as the speech pathologist labelled them.

“Luscious lips Louise licks her lemon ice cream.”

And I would repeat. Lurching and sprinting and stumbling and restarting until finally I said it right just once. Then again - nope. Take breath, and try again.

“Wushus wipps Woo-ees wicks huh wem’m ice cuh-weam.”

My mother took a deep breath, smiled warmly, took my hand, and exhaled her usual line: “Did you try your best?”

The Rs sat like salty pebbles in my mouth, the Ls ever so slightly out of reach, longer words tending to scrunch themselves into spaces reserved for their smaller siblings. Even speaking my own thoughts, my mouth defied the laws of language traffic, not by speeding or missing the stop sign back there, but by going half the speed limit with a line of words that just want to pass you on that busy and narrow road. I felt like I read Silverstein for eons, under mandate to practice reading out loud. With a book in hand, speaking was yet another process on top of the internal. My eyes went faster than my brain, which in turn went faster than my mouth. Words got caught in the flow of the stream, and were spit out tangled. At which point, my brain cut it off. Hard stop. Restart the sentence. Repeat the same fragment, the same phrase, the same syllable until I cleared the hurdle. Repetitive. Obsessive. Focus on one word. Say it out loud. Wrong. Say it again. Nope, one more time. No. Over and over until it came out right. Finally. Perfection was always key.

A determined faux-smile and forward academic intention often sat steadfast on my face, never saying no. The more I do, the less negative of me they’ll see – they’ll have too much else to focus on. Now discernable in speech and language, my stories began to be heard. They became attributes, overblown actions of who I was, all for show, hiding myself in the spotlight.

The mask was torn off as I stepped through the door. Get home in time for dinner, then homework after. My parents went to bed, I worked until I was done – usually approaching 3:00. Alarm at 6:00. Hair pulled out in the shower. Student government meetings, honor society events, choir performances. Eloquent, present, forceful. New students often thought I was a substitute teacher; I blame the always-refilled travel coffee mug. A Janus of emotional proportions, I swung from anxious tremors to a collected and presentable young man. Trying to hold all of myself in, anything less than exact and well-done was deemed to be not my best, not me, not worthy of my story.

I dropped the knife, and I still don’t know what made me let go. I didn’t eat for two days. I didn’t speak for three. A therapist named Ryan spoke with me over the phone, and I barely whispered answers. I saw him in person the next day, then twice weekly for some time, then once weekly until I moved to Boston for school. Major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder. His practice sat in a surprisingly spacious suite in a renovated textile mill, windows overlooking the river punctuated the brick walls and flooded light to the impossibly high ceilings. My seat faced away from the windows, towards Ryan, towards the clock, the door. The oversized armchair let me sink into the warm beige cushions, my feet not quite reaching either the floor or the steel-framed glass coffee table supporting a white ceramic vase of eucalyptus clippings and a single box of tissues. Eye contact was a rarity at first, instead opting to pass my eyes over the vaguely Buddhist paintings and tapestries, avoiding the man who had told me to slow down. Yet I resentfully looked forward to it. He recommended yoga, avoiding dairy, journaling. He kept me keeping myself alive.

Over countless afternoons sunk into that oversized armchair, my created stories began to dissolve. The façade of a falsified narrative, grounded in a foundation of misplaced defenses, cracked. And so began the process of rebuilding my own story, real, present, experienced, lived, honest. My own story worth telling, one of countless in the lineage of storytellers in our family.

To our family, the role of the storyteller is a shared one. Orators of each generation naturally gravitate towards our collective history, hoping, in some way, to carry it forward for those yet to come. Yet as my grandmother has seen the passing of her sisters and cousins, she is now the sole member of her generation to bear the responsibility. She has told stories, countless, to her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, pulling the thread just a bit further, tying it to each of us to connect our future to our past. As we all understand that her time as storyteller is coming to a close, my father and I have taken up the torch, along with a few of his cousins and their children, to be sure our family stories are ones that last. He as researcher and analyst, I as archivist and documentarian, we do our best to capture our story before it is lost.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table, Mémère to my right, my small shaky hands nestled into hers, their lines telling stories themselves of all she has held, seen, done, heard, wondered, prayed. She recited to me the story of her great-grandmother, Daisy Hebert. Her voice held a meter, a balanced pace of inflections and intonations, holding her wide-eyed audience of one. Weaving family fact with local legend, specifics and details occasionally morphing but emotion remaining steadfastly true. She told me of how Daisy’s mother died during childbirth, of her father, an ailing and respected Northern Cree tribal leader, no longer able to care for her, how she was then adopted by Dr. Hebert, the doctor of the nearby Quebecois farming settlement in northern Vermont. I remember her telling me of Daisy learning to speak English, of her building an honest life in a community she did not know, of instilling in her family a respect for their history but a pride in where we’re going. Mémère reminded me, in closing Daisy’s story, of the reason we carry on our family history - a story worth sharing is a story worth remembering.

To do all I can to remember will never feel like enough, but I will do my best to carry our stories – my own, and all that have been told before me. And although Mémère can no longer tell me her stories herself, I can capture all she has left for me, in memory and what she leaves behind.