Fonder Hearts

My grandmother, sitting at the oak table near the stove in her kitchen told me stories about her younger life. These were not in depth narratives. In keeping with her reserved and secretive nature Grandmama threw out interesting tidbits from here and there, randomly selected or remembered. By the time I was old enough to spend hours with her in the kitchen, accepting the sugar bowl she pushed my way to help make the twice-percolated chicory coffee palatable, the house had already become an impenetrable fortress from the world. Windows that my grandfather nailed shut to the framing sat hidden behind layers of blinds, sheers and heavy, lined curtains. Locked storm doors stood behind locked and chained inner doors. A wooden gate divided the driveway and marked the only opening in the tall privacy fence that surrounded the back and side yards that formed a blockade against a quiet, friendly neighborhood that never experienced a down turn.

“I hated when your grandpappy worked the night shift,” she reminisced. “I pushed a chair to the back door and sat through the night with Eldon, a little baby then, sleeping on my lap. I was so happy to hear those heavy footsteps on the back stoop when your grandpappy returned home.”

She heaved herself out of the wooden chair and clamored across the kitchen floor in her black pumps and opened one of the heavy-lacquered cabinet drawers. A row of Grandpappy’s Creole tomatoes lined the green-tiled counter top. She walked to the stove with a big serving spoon, lifted one of the pot lids and stirred. The scent of her brown gravy escaped the pot and settled into the kitchen. Later, she’d add the meatballs that sat under a dishtowel on a plate in the refrigerator. “Do you know that the first time he worked at night I couldn’t stay in the house? I tried. But I just couldn’t do it and so I took the baby and caught the very last bus to my parents’ house.”

I laughed at the contradictory nature of her behavior.


She sat back down at the table and watched me pour more Pet milk into my coffee. The café au lait at home looked a creamy gray in our cups but this looked like a roux. Her fingers, thin and bony, her knuckles full of arthritis that prevented her from removing the thin gold band on her left hand, traced imaginary lines in the green tablecloth. “Grandpappy took a job in Youngstown, Ohio. Your mama was a baby.”

I sipped the coffee from a spoon, un-dissolved sugar melting on my tongue. “I guess you couldn’t sit by the door then,” I smiled, trying to imagine my grandfather north of New Orleans.


“No,” Grandmama agreed. “My cousin’s son Roy came to stay with me and help out while Grandpappy was gone.” I didn’t know Roy. By that time Grandmama had lost touch with most of the people from her past. She provided no other details.

“Did I tell you about when I was struck by lightning?” she asked, like she was flipping through the pages of a memory book and reading only the captions.


“Tell me,” I encouraged, my legs swinging under the table as if we had a lifetime to fill in the details.

Among my grandparents’ things, my mother found letters that my grandfather wrote to my grandmother during his time in Ohio. Among them were cards to my mom and her brother. Most intriguing to me was the way he closed the handwritten letters to my grandmother. “Your lover,” he wrote before signing his name with the familiar rounded, generous curves of his “E”.


Dad periodically travelled for work for continuing education courses or meteorological seminars and in the early days of those travels returned from various US cities, sometimes obscure ones, with treasured trinkets for each of us. He brought my sister Kerri a beautiful book of Russian fairy tales after a trip and gave me a favorite doll that wore a plaid skirt and a red ribbon tied in her hair. We could set up the National Mall in miniature on the den floor with the souvenir monuments Dad brought from Washington DC. Later on we were happy with the soaps and moisturizers he brought us from the hotels. I remember his return home from these trips more than his absence due, no doubt, to Mom's highly organized and efficient running of the household.

Each summer Dad went away to summer camp as part of his service in the National Guard. Pulled from sleep early for a July day, I found my way down the stairs where Dad and his friend, Nick Adams, stood in the breakfast room. Both men wore BDUs, their deep male voices filling the room where they stood drinking coffee but already in the place they were going and it sounded foreign to me. Mom encouraged us to say good-bye quickly so that the men could get on the road and we did, most of us returning up the stairs for more sleep. The air-conditioning, blowing cool, dry air over our bodies drowned out the sound of the car pulling away.

The garden seemed always at its peak when Dad went to summer camp, my brothers expected to harvest the tomatoes, green beans, okra and cucumbers that weighed heavily and plentiful on the hilly rows. Occasionally, I was called upon to weed, stepping bare feet into the hardened footprints of my father in the dirt between the rows as my fingers searched for unwanted grass and weeds below the fruitful plants. My brothers, perhaps from too much rain or busy summer schedules, often neglected the garden and remembered their duty only as my father’s return approached. Major food wars with overripe vegetables took place in and around the garden and even into the far reaches of the yard before the boys offered my mother a disappointing harvest. Everyone appeared baffled at the lack of bounty. My mother, after all, hadn’t had much opportunity to keep after the boys because she spent my Dad’s absence dealing with various household calamities particular to each summer. Perhaps it was the washing machine that spewed water everywhere before refusing to work or the van suddenly riding about town in a plume of smoke.

The days after Craig’s departure to Boston can now be tallied in weeks. The house isn’t any quieter. Sometimes I find I’m not even alone at night as Rem’s rotation of musical beds now includes mine. The most difficult part of Craig’s absence is that I sit here in Asheville, indefinitely, while my life is somewhere else.