a nonspecific cache of recollections.

[My Grandfather & Grandmother. We called them PawPaw & Bunny]

I remember PawPaw grabbing and pulling me onto Holly, his horse, to ride bareback & swiftly to the other side of the farm. We fell off into some leaves by the wooden shed. I remember being disturbed but unhurt.

[This is Holly, a few months before she died. She was over 30 years old. I spotted her in a field that belonged to an old friend of PawPaw’s. This lady had kindly taken Holly in when he had to sell the farm.]

I remember PawPaws trucker hats, as I would later call them. I remember his jackets. I remember how he mixed 3 or 4 different kinds of cereals into a plastic container. It was his favorite. I remember how he loved pecans. He always had a bowl of them and a tool to crack them laying on top of the pile. There was a discard bowl for the shells and bad parts. I remember him always singing, always rum-pum-pumming like he was in a marching band all day long. He had a tuba and a big drum. I remember playing dominoes at night. I cheated and wondered why no one caught me. I remember watching Apollo 13 with him. It was his favorite movie. I didn’t understand why then, but I liked it, too, mostly because I loved Tom Hanks.

I remember his house. The light post. The big crepe myrtle we climbed in. The giant gold plate on the mantle. The fireplace with real wood. The bag of blocks in the closet. The upright piano in the entry way. The metronome. Trying to play the sheet music that sat there with too many notes and signs for my inexperienced fingers to get past the first bar successfully. I remember how it smelled when you walked into the apartment that was added on at some point long before I was born. All the tile was so ugly. Everywhere the tile and carpet were ugly. I wondered why old people liked ugly floors and wood paneled walls. If I close my eyes I can smell each of the rooms. I don’t know how to describe the smells, except the bathroom. The bathroom smelled like cheap bar soap. 

I remember his things. The TV with a dial you turn by hand. It had 4 channels. The typewriter. The Macintosh computer with it’s tiny screen. I remember plastic flowers in vases and porcelain figurines. The Mother Goose Rhymes book. The antiquated jack in the box that I expect gave me horrible nightmares. But the pictures! I loved the pictures and the paintings on the wall, and the way they hung all over. I remember the table with the glass top that showed a drawer full of seashells that my mother and her sister had collected when they lived on Kwajalein Island, part of the Marshall Islands. Mom told me PawPaw would take a boat to the neighboring islands where the natives were to teach Sunday school. Kwajalein is the ends of the earth to me, and I want to go there so badly. There was one shell in the drawer that had googly eyes glued onto it. I always opened the drawer to see that one. I can’t quite remember what it looked like. It had a bit of coral glued on it… I can’t remember. Mom has the table now. I don’t know where the shells are.

[Kwajalein, Marshall Islands]

I remember PawPaw’s room. The closet with the sliding mirror doors. His bed with a canopy from the ceiling. It must have been Bunny’s doing. Bunny was my grandma. Her name was really Bernie, but we called her Bunny. She died when I was about 5. She had Leukemia. I wish I knew everything about her. I remember her in pearl earrings and lipstick, but I could be making that up. I wish I could get in my red silky little girl nightgown and fall asleep around her neck like I was doing in the only picture I seem to have of us. I think she would have been my very favorite person in the whole world.

[My Bunny]

I remember the back yard. The deck. The gazebo. The roses. The garage. Once, PawPaw accidentally rolled up my neck in the station wagon window as we were pulling out. I tried to scream but couldn’t. Cherilyn told him to roll it down. I laughed about it the next day. It’s still funny. I remember his truck—the seat covers made of wooden beads. It smelled like the feed we gave Holly and the donkeys. I remember the red metal gate we opened and closed by hand. There was a chain wrapped around it with a padlock. I remember feeding the cows sugar cane. He bought a young cow with a ring in its nose. It got spooked once and jumped over Cherilyn. He sold that cow. I remember finding earthworms under fallen leaves to fish with in the pond. I remember the fishing hook shooting through my pinky one day and going to the emergency clinic on Broadway. They kept the hook somewhere in a jewelry box after they fished it out. I remember realizing the farm wasn’t a farm, just a piece of land with animals and a pond, a wooden shed, peach trees and a hay bale with boots sticking out.

[I jumped the fence with some friends once, years after PawPaw had sold the farm]

I remember PawPaw. I remember his hands. Old and stiff and needing to be held. His scratchy stubbled chin when he kissed my head. His wedding ring finger that ended abruptly at the middle knuckle, and the middle finger next to it that was only a little longer. He had stuck his hand in a mower once. I remember he liked marionettes and puppets. And children. He wrote a book of Sunday school skits to be performed with puppets. He liked writing. He published a book. When I read it, it reminded me of his truck and the farm. And him. His real name was A. C. Chance. As a boy, he decided that stood for Atlas Christopher. Atlas! If I ever have a son, I am quite determined to name him Atlas.

I remember a flat iron figure from Japan that hung on the back porch wall. I took it from the boxes when his Alzheimer’s became quite bad and they had to move him to a home. I took his Apollo 11 badge then, too.

I remember when he sold the farm.

He was my last remaining grandparent. When he passed away, I was in India and couldn’t come home.

I remember when we packed up his things and sold the house. I wish we had never sold any of it.

…It’s okay, though, because I remember everything. You wouldn’t believe some of it. I hardly do.