I fear that my knowledge of my grandmother is incomplete. During holidays, her name rarely comes up anymore, as if her death signaled the exsanguination of her whole existence. Once a full blooded human being, she has now been reduced to dry remarks and yellowing photographs. She died when I was young; my only memories of her generally involve a small crystal bowl filled with hard candy. I do not remember what happened when she died, I only recall sitting in the hallway of the hospital on a stack of mattress like in “The Princess and the Pea.” I had no feeling of discomfort or awareness that my grandmother was dying; I couldn’t feel that pea under the mattresses.
All of her things were packed up into boxes and moved into our basement. Photographs, letters, jewelry, fine china, and books were shoved against the concrete walls, entombed with all the other things we keep hidden from the rest of the house. Most of them were not even labeled. I've always hated the basement. The cement floor is riddled with cracks and dangerous to bare feet. In one corner, there are three work benches, cluttered with tools with no hint of organization. In another corner, there is the washer and dryer and beside that is a large round table which became the home for anything left in the pockets of clothes. Change, receipts, make-up, buttons, cough drops. The rest of the room was filled with boxes.
Sometimes I would bring up a tea cup I found in one of the boxes and place it upstairs. Later that day, the cup would find its way back into the box it came from, back to its resting place beneath the earth. I also brought up old photographs and my father smiled, telling small stories about each photo. He said that we need to get them framed but they sat on the table for months, mail and newspapers piling on top of them until they were, once again, moved out of sight.
I would hear the occasional story about her. My father laughed as he reminisced about his childhood with his sister and three brothers. He grinned when he said that they weren’t always the most well behaved children and when they got in trouble, Grandma would pick up whatever was the closest to her and swing. “Whatever she could get her hands on” he chuckled. Since she spent most of the time in the kitchen, the available weapons included pots, pans, spoons, and cords from electrical appliances. If the child was innocent, she would smartly reply “Then that’s for the time you didn’t get caught!”
Sometimes I imagine her things jumping out of the boxes. Her silver spoons scoop at the thin concrete floor until they hit earth. The tea cups detach from their saucers and move the dirt into a corner. As the hole gets deeper, her necklaces bind together and lift the teacups from the hole, like a bucket from a well, and dump the soil. A spot of sunlight breaks through and the fine china start to chatter gleefully. Books flutter their bindings in excitement and jump into the tunnel, forming a staircase. The legs in the photographs pop out of the paper and walk down the book steps, my grandmother’s wedding photo leading the parade. An embroidered handkerchief sticks to an old piece of tape on the back of the wedding photo, assuming the position of the veil. The other photographs tread lightly but they are all smiling at the bride.
The light passes over the photo as she emerges; her cheeks flush red and her chestnut brown hair shines. She rises and grows, peeling from the photograph, the yellowing paper shrinking behind her like dry skin. I see her in the backyard through my window, walking amongst the garden with her bouquet in full bloom. A procession of her belongings march behind her and lift her delicate veil off the grass. She pauses and turns toward me with a petite smile before disappearing behind the forsythia bushes. Not all of her should remain buried.
