Memorial

We made it home again after our trip to St. Louis. It was a good visit – better than I was expecting. It was healing to be at the memorial, to see so many family and friends come together to remember our grandmother. It was sad, and I definitely shed some tears, but I didn’t ugly cry until I said goodbye to her house the night before I left.

I spent every summer in that house growing up. It’s been in my life far longer than any other house and it meant something very special to me. It was a house where only good things happened – where aunts and uncles and cousins I only saw once a year ate around a table, laughing and talking and sharing stories. It’s where my cousins and I invented and played elaborate games in the basement for hours on end, where we held so hard onto the underside of the player piano our finger tips turned white, where we each stood on a pedal of the stationary bike and bobbed up and down, up and down. It’s where we dressed up in our mothers’ old wedding gowns and built forts out of the cardboard bricks and carefully spelled out business letters on the typewriter. It’s where we positioned all my grandmother’s old perfume bottles so that someone might want to buy one, and where we wrote up the receipts when they did.

Saying goodbye to that house was really hard. Harder than I expected. My grandmother lived there for over 60 years. My father grew up there. I spent my summers there. It changed very little over those six decades, and it was a very special place for me indeed.

My grandmother evidently kept every letter or card anyone had ever given to her as an adult, and when we went through them the stack from me was by far the biggest. I wrote her letters and cards, typed and on fancy stationary. Seeing those letters was jarring – I wouldn’t have remembered that I wrote her so often. I have yet to read through them, but I did bring them home. My mom couldn’t understand why I would want to keep those old letters when I was so eager to throw away my journals and diaries, but it’s different when you write for someone else. I will definitely read through them some day, but not until I’m ready to work through some more grief, for both the loss of my grandmother and the loss of whoever I was all those years ago.

Coming home was hard and it’s been a tough week. I had a lot of things that needed to be done by Tuesday and Wednesday and now all of that is past and a weight has lifted and I’m finally ready to face the holidays. We put up our tree on Monday, did the lights Tuesday and finally put up the ornaments last night. My grandmother loved this time of year (for the past three years she kept a Christmas tree up year round!), and I’m trying to celebrate her as I celebrate the season.

Being with my grandmother always meant being with my aunts and uncles and cousins, and spending Thanksgiving with them this year was a remind of how amazing they are and how much I cherish them in my life. I was definitely thankful to spend the week with them, and now I’m so glad to be home.

How was your Thanksgiving?