My father grew up in a small house in a small town in a rural area through which first French trappers traipsed and then settlers came, carving out farms in the fertile valley of the Wabash River. In places such as that, the roads are in a grid pattern only if they were added later, following section lines. And, of course, there is the river and the low-lying flood plain that will stop your logical route and send you backtracking. You don’t really get lost; you just aren’t quite certain sometimes of “the big picture.”
I don’t think I really grasped that big picture of the relationship of locations; I was a backseat traveller; we were at Grandma’s in Kingman and then we were at Uncle Trell’s, or Aunt Mary’s or Duane’s. It just happened that way; I’d get in the car and then I’d get out – a sort of slow motion Star Trek beaming.
But one place I was certain of – the house at the end of the road, my grandparents house. I have a firm understanding of everything there, or as it was. When I was there, I generally climbed the staircase, which turned at a landing and then at the top, I would turn right, into a room with beds and flannel sheets and my great-grandfather’s picture in Union Blue on the wall. I wonder now for the first time: Was my father born in that room?
Sometimes my cousin closest to my age would stay overnight with me. I have never thought of it before, but I imagine that room is the backdrop – the wallpaper – of all this time we have known each other. We haven’t spent that much time together, living in different parts of the country for several years, but we have always been linked by our grandparent’s house.
Her mother, my father – brother and sister; I believe we have many genetic traits in common. She is the cousin who I wrote about becoming ill after having just been up here. We sat side by side in the infamous Maria’s Mexican Restaurant that didn’t have enough menus and where my taco salad was soupy. We, along with her sister, were caught up in the seemingly ridiculousness of the experience.
I had been thinking of both of them and the idea of more little adventures in the future when I found out she had suffered a heart attack. Now I find myself trying to merge the memory of that room with the flannel sheets at the top of Grandma’s stairs with this reality of updates. I think of her on crisp hospital sheets and surrounded by pharmaceutical smells instead of the scent of rural Indiana coming in the window.
I don’t really understand why this turn of events has such a hold on me. Is it the selfish thought that it could have been me who went from laughing at no menus to being seriously ill? Does it scare me? Perhaps. I think, though, I am deeply affected by the shadow cast on that memory of the room at the top of the stairs with the flannel sheets.
I am confused in my feelings and in my ability to express them. I have no way to end this post. Probably only the typing will stop; the essence of it will linger on.