Do you want to go with your grandpa? Of course! Already packed! What an adventure that 20-minute drive to our grandparents’ house was, driving that old road that needed repair – driving there or riding a roller coaster is practically the same thing – in Grandpa’s Clio, listening to the same cassette on blast, and the closer we got to that yellow house in the forest – my true happy place – the more our excitement grew.
My sister and I loved going there. We knew that for those couple of days, we were in for a life out of a cartoon. We would cozy up on the couch opposite Grandma, and she would start telling us stories about witches and fairies in the nearby forest or about angels helping kids lost there. She would always tell us about the great hound lurking in the forest (that was technically true because the neighbors had dogs that would sometimes get loose and start sniffing around, often reaching our grandparents’ house, so she needed to make sure we didn’t go out alone. I always pictured it as a tall, dark, hairy wolf with big fangs that would appear out of nowhere, but it was actually just a hunting dog.) Grandpa would mutter a snarky comment under his mustache to piss off Grandma. Their banter was hilarious growing up.
There was, and still is, a glass closet in the living room we weren’t allowed to touch. The glasses and bottles on the upper shelves could break, or God forbid, the closet could fall on us (actually, it was huge, and we couldn’t possibly move it, but better be safe). When Grandma would ask us to get something from one of the drawers, it was like a treasure hunt, and we finally reached the treasure chest. That was also an exaggeration because the closet had a purely practical purpose, but when we were kids, our grandparents’ house was a magical castle.
We would sit there in the evening, and Grandma would cut us some apples (peel the apples and cut them into small sections, put them on a plate, even though we never did that at home – we would just wash them – and that’s something she kept doing even when we grew up), tell another tale, or we would be drawing in that writing block that had lines on one side and was blank on the other. I remember the bunny drawings that both my grandparents did. It’s engraved in my mind, but I wish I had kept those drawings. You don’t really appreciate much when you’re a kid. You think it’s always going to be there.
The mornings at my grandparents’ house were the most magical. We would have coffee with Grandma (it wasn’t coffee. It was a lot of milk with a drop of coffee to cover the taste of milk because my sister and I didn’t like it), while Grandpa went to buy the newspaper (and stray to the local bar for a coffee with his friends). We would choose the mugs like our whole day depended on what mug we would have our coffee in. Then we would wait for a bread seller who would always drive by at 11 a.m. That had the same effect as the ice cream truck, only with pastries.
After that, we would wander around the forest with Grandma. We would pick primrose and cyclamens, and Grandma would show us what plants were good for what, what healing properties they had, and what plants were dangerous. Primrose and cyclamen are not just any flowers now. They remind me of home.
After returning from our walk, we would put our bouquets in a glass because they were too small for a vase, and then we would run to Grandpa to feed the chickens.
The steps on the side of the house, the old iron fence, the grapevine, the brown wooden window shutters, the random wooden bench on the balcony that Grandpa probably made and that had color peeling off from age, the window on the northern side of the house, overlooking the street, the pen stand that feels like a relic to me, even though it’s just a pen stand, that glass closet, the Mary Magdalene painting above the TV, the tiny old wood stove, a pile of newspapers, an even bigger pile of crossword puzzles that Grandma loved to solve, the blue fruit bowl, and Grandpa’s glass mug, a bowl of my favorite wafers, and my grandparents, each in their own spot, with glasses on the tip of their noses, reading and watching TV, teasing and laughing, my sister and I happier than ever.
Happy. In that house, when we were seven and twelve and nineteen.
My Little Hawk 