This is an excerpt from a project that I've been working on for myself, a collection of memories of "Manama," my grandma, Clara Bartel.
“Knock knock!” I shout as I push open the screen door. "Come in," she hollers back. It has been a long time since the days when she waited for me on the front porch. She knows I’m coming. I called earlier to ask if it was alright. “Yeah. Come on,” she had said. Of course it’s alright. And of course she’s not busy. She’s too old to be busy, as she often says. But I call out so as not to scare her. Though I doubt that she’s scared of much these days. I reckon she’s too old to be scared of much, either. Come to think of it, she's never been one for fear.
I walk into her place surprised, even though I've prepared myself for what I’ll find there. Contrary to the laws of the universe, I know that the house has somehow shrunk over the last twenty-five years. I find it smaller each time I enter. Here I’m a giant in a dollhouse. I know that I can rationalize it by reminding myself that the time I spent here was when I was much smaller. It is my body that has grown and not the house that has shrunk. But stepping over that threshold, hearing her voice, smelling the smell of the place—it all does something to me. I’m transported back to a time before having my own kids, before getting married, before moving off to college, before puberty and the summer when I “grew like a beanstalk.” It’s the time-travel that makes it hard to believe that the house hasn’t shrunk.
I tell her she doesn’t have to get up. But, of course she does. Slower this time than when I last visited. We give our hugs and greetings. As I hug her, I realize that she’s smaller than I remember, too. This, I remind myself is not because I’m the one who has changed. She settles back into the EZ-chair where, I reckon, she spends about eighty-five percent of her time these days. She doesn’t have to ask us to sit down; I choose another EZ-chair, knowing to avoid the couch, which will swallow you alive. (Terese, apparently, does not remember this important factoid.) We’re already making ourselves at home. The boys need no reminder about where the toys are stashed and head straight for the cabinet.
The conversation runs in familiar grooves. We talk about the trip, offering our standard schpeal about the long drive with little people. When we left. Where we stopped for the night. She always asks, “How long you plannin’ on stayin’?” I’m never sure how she feels about our answer, but it seems that she’s always a little disappointed that it isn’t longer—and this is without judgment, only love. We ask her about the family—starting with the near-relations and moving on to those who live in the area. We ask about church and friends. These conversations are filled with frequent and long pauses.
These pauses used to be filled only with relentless "tick tock" of the old clock above the couch. But no longer. The boys, by now, have emptied the cabinet of several large trucks. The sounds of the toys take me back thirty years. Many of the trucks were bonafide antiques even then. All of them, I daresay, would easily classify as such now. But they’re still running strong proving true the platitude that, “They don’t make ‘em like they used to.” The metal trucks clang against one another, the farm animals bounce in the bed of the trailer, the wheels make their familiar clamor on the dining room linoleum.
And so it is that I begin to settle in to the *Shalom* of the place and the person whose life makes it a place of peace. I am welcomed home.
