You know, I keep this blog for myself. I tell certain, select individuals how to find it if I’ve covered something that might be of interest to them, and anyone looking around the internet can find it, too. But my readership is infinitesimal, and I have no intention of changing that. I mostly just want a record of my hikes and travels. And since scrapbooking is not my kind of thing, I blog and call it a “photo-journal.” But sometimes my various treks raise thoughts that aren’t necessarily in keeping with the nature of the blog, and I give voice to them anyway. Like this. Ever since life called me back within the sphere of Oil City, my hometown, I’ve been thinking more and more about the strange old couple there who were known to me as “grandma” and my almost completely unknowable “grandpa.” He came back from Germany after World War II and barely uttered another word until his death. He headed off to Pennzoil each weekday morning with a lunch bucket and a big thermos of coffee. The oil refinery made the whole valley smell like fresh bandages back in those days. It’s a smell I miss.
This was my grandparents’ house. Actually, it was our house, but my grandparents lived there because my father gave up his true calling as an art teacher and fell into a line of work where housing was provided and frequent relocations were expected. I took this photo in January of 2020, on the day I turned 50 and my now-dead grandfather would have turned 100. He was 50 years older than me to the day. And I was his 7th grandchild—and far from the last. Can you imagine being a grandfather seven times over by the time you’re 50? The house had been sitting abandoned already for a year or two prior to the photo—but much neglected for long decades prior to being deserted. Grandma was a mean old woman, about as tall as newell post, and she hated us. My four siblings and I were sent individually each summer to spend a week with my OTHER grandma (who adored us), so it only seemed fair to my parents that each of us should spend a week with the Oil City grandma too—despite the fact that she did not want us. During her week playing grandma—of which she had five every summer, mind you—she would always send us off to stay with my aunt, uncle, and cousins in the nearby village of Plumer. “Kids need to be in the country,” she would say. What she meant by that was, “Kids need to be where I am not.” I suppose you can’t blame an old lady for wanting to have her own space. She had a pet skunk as a child, when she was growing up very near to the place where I just bought a hunting camp. She used to scrub our faces with a washcloth as if she were scraping barnacles from the hull of a tugboat. She was a terrible cook, a breathless gossip, and I rarely saw her smile. If she did get stuck keeping us at her house overnight, she always made us pray on our knees just before bed, kneeling with our elbows on the seat of the couch. (Bad religion was her family’s banshee.) Then we’d lie awake and listen to the scary noises in her big, creepy house—a place that I loved to explore.
But, as happens with many folks, grandma became kinder as she grew older and needier. By the time I got back from half-a-decade living overseas, she had begun to soften around the edges. I actually helped her and grandpa move into a retirement high rise because the old house, pictured here, was barely livable. It hadn’t been painted since the 1970s; the roof leaked; the electrical wiring was a real fire-hazard; the windows were drafty and broken in places; high porches were rotting off the back and sides of the house; squirrels, chipmunks, and mice had made burrows in the walls; the plumbing was a mess. Worst of all, the only bathroom was on the second floor—where old grandma could no longer venture. The house sat empty until I, newly repatriated and unsure of myself, decided to live there alone while I tried to get my bearings and get used to being back in America. I felt a little bit responsible for her and grandpa. They’d never invested much time or care into me, but they were old and needy and running loose in the world. Grandpa drove his ancient Dodge Dart the wrong way down a one-way street and got chased a few miles by the police. He never heard the sirens or saw the flashing lights nor even knew that they were chasing him till he parked at his high rise. On her deathbed, I told my grandmother I loved her, and she said, “Thanks.” She was terrified of dying. She half-believed she was going to wake up in hell for getting divorced (from an abuser) and remarried…back in the 1940s. Bad religion runs deep, and many people never escape it. It makes them mean in life and frightened in death. Faith ought to be a source of comfort and goodwill and hope.
Now, if you’ve waded through all of my reminiscing about people and places you do not know, then click HERE for a link to my December hiking trip to The Needles District in Canyonlands National Park, Utah. It was a beautiful place, but not my world. I belong beneath the shade of hemlocks. As A.E. Housman says: “Give me a land of boughs in leaf, a land of trees that stand. Where trees are fallen, there is grief; I love no leafless land…”
No comments:
Post a Comment