back to work

[dragonlady7]

I had from Wednesday until yesterday off, and spent it at my parents' house in Melrose. It was awesome. There was nothing scheduled. I went on two or three big big long walks all over the back forty, I embroidered two small pieces just while sitting by the woodstove talking and drinking, I visited with my grandmother, and I pawed through her belongings that were removed from her apartment when she went into the nursing home, and crammed my tiny car completely full of things to make the trip back to Buffalo.
I realized I don't really care about whether things I get are new or used. I am happier to get many of these items of Gram's, none particularly valuable but all useful, than I would have been had someone given me an enormous gift card to Target or somesuch. Some of it, like the tool for cutting butter into flour to make pastry, and the smaller-than-now-standard bread pans, I have been searching for for years unsuccessfully in stores, and have concluded they just don't make in that form-factor anymore. Some of it, like the thin iron stand she had to hold her morning paper, I only took because I respond so deeply to early memories of looking at it / playing with it. (I will probably use it to hold instructions as I sew or bake, since I do not take a newspaper.) Much of it I took because the kitchen stuff I've cobbled together from gifts, purchases, and the stuff people left behind in other apartments where I lived is actually pretty gross and fragmentary. I now have Revere ware copper-bottomed pans, including a braising pan and a Dutch oven-type saucepan-- and this means I can dispose of several frying pans and pots that are either dented aluminum, or non-stick with the coating coming off. The copper bottoms are tarnished, but they aren't dented; one saucepan has a slightly misshapen rim, but the lid still fits. A nested set of metal mixing bowls means I can dispose of several stained and mismatched plastic bowls I acquired in college.
It does mean I have to reorganize.
But I would rather have these things, some of them sixty years old, than a brand-new set in whatever style is trendy. I want simple pans, and I am so happy to have some that I recognize from when I was a child. Us kids, our first-ever Night Away From Home was traditionally at Grandma's, and we would do them periodically, individually. It was one of the few early times I was treated as an individual. And it was my first inkling that not everyone lived the same way I did. Grandma drank different juice in the mornings, and cooked her eggs differently, and naturally thought of different topics of conversation, and read her paper propped up in a holder instead of spread out on the table, and kept her house warmer and had very old pictures and objects and knew about different things and just didn't care about some things that Mom cared a lot about.
I haven't lost my Grandma yet. She is very different-- much smaller, much quieter, and much less ready to laugh or respond to things or have an opinion or stand up for herself. She can walk, they insist, but she doesn't think so. She went through a very bad phase of confusion when she first came to the nursing home, since she was so suddenly whisked away from her former life and surroundings, and so most of the staff believes her demented, though she is not. She may last another decade, but she only vaguely now resembles the woman who mixed orange juice and cranberry juice for me, and who told me when I went to Europe ten years ago to be careful, if I couldn't be good.

But perhaps someday I will make my nephew eggs in that same pan, while he sits in the chair my great-grandfather used at his postmaster's desk in Niskayuna, and put juice in that same green glass, and give him advice his mother wouldn't.

Comments

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

DEFINITELY give him advice his mother wouldn't. :)