Over the River and Through the Woods

This Tuesday morning, while I was taking the children to the park, my grandmother's house was on fire. 

My grandmother doesn't live there anymore (she died when I was in high school), so we didn't know about it until we drove by last night.

The addition that my grandfather put on the back of the house was totally destroyed (he died before I was born). This is where my grandmother would sit and watch through the window as my brother and I played on our Slip N' Slide, which was kept at her house because our backyard wasn't big enough for it. 

She wasn't the kind of grandma to actually come out and play with us. There was the risk of getting her hair wet, for one. She was more the sort of grandma who took us to Showbiz Pizza (currently Chuck E. Cheese's) and got freaked out when we wouldn't sit quietly at the table and eat our pizza.

But she was also the sort of grandma who let us root around in her basement for hours and play with whatever mysterious treasure we found, who never returned from a senior bus tour of an exotic local without a suitcase full of souveniers for the kiddies. I was especially fond of the tartan kilt-and-beanie she brought me from Scotland.

Holiday dinners often took place at her house, perhaps because my mother couldn't be trusted to do things properly.

Endless rounds of family pictures were taken in this living room.

The small Christmas tree stood to the left of the fireplace, next to a cabinet of Hummel figurines that I was often reprimanded for wanting to play with (the first time I touched them was when we packed up her possessions after she died).

I often spent weekends at her house, weekends which I both anticipated and dreaded. To this day, the taste of Diet Sprite makes me twitchy, because that was the only 'kid-friendly' beverage on offer in her kitchen, where we would cook dinner together and she would gently criticize my technique in everything from dough-rolling to egg-scrambling. 

It felt like failing a test in school; or, I imagined it did, since I was a fussy little bookworm who'd never experienced academic failure first hand. I knew that every test I failed in the kitchen was yet another example of my mother's lax parenting, so my compulsion to succeed was not merely that of a suck-up who got along better with adults than with other children and was therefore desperate to win grown-up approval. It was a matter of family pride, mom's side against dad's side, in which I fought to defend my mother's ability to educate me in the lady-like arts. 

As I got older, I also proved deficient in doing my hair, picking appropriate clothing and putting on make-up (she did not appreciate the my Goth stylings). But her disapproval was perversely complimentary, because what's the point of ripped fishnets and spiked collars if not to alarm the elderly? 

And, at a time when I hated everything about my body, it meant something that she said "What do you need all that make-up for, when you're a beautiful girl with beautiful skin?" 

Until I saw the burned-out windows of the house, I alway imagined (without ever realizing it) that the inside remained static, that the new owners would not dare tamper with the rust colored carpet, the crochet toilet-paper doll, the crucifixes in every room.

All that's left of the house as I remember it are the bits and pieces the rest of the family inherited. I myself scored a relief print of the The Last Supper, a nightstand-sized Virgin Mary, and a plaster copy of The Wrestlers.

I won't be surprised if they tear down the entire house now that it's been gutted. Instead of bemoaning the state of the lawn every time we drive by (the new owners were actually parking on it at one point), we'll be treated to a riff on the a new theme. Perhaps "That house was built in the 1950s and a single family lived in it for nearly fifty years with no problems, but as soon as we sold it..."

To add an element of weird coincidence, the park the children and I were playing at while the house was on fire was Ackermann Park, which is also my grandmother's maiden name.