The home my grandparents made

Tuesday night I lay awake in bed thinking about how strange it would be to enter my grandparents' house and neither of them be there.

And then I cried silently while my husband slept next to me, the tears matting my hair and dribbling into my ears.

I love Grandpa and Grandmama's house in that small Idaho town where both my parents spent years of their childhood. Even though my grandparents didn't acquire that house until I was a teenager, it's the one I associate most with their presence. And so to be in it, and they be absent, will be very sad.

It's a fine, old two-story home, partitioned into many rooms that have changed slowly over the years, but those rooms always seemed to be brimming with family, with life, and with small, energetic dogs who followed my grandfather around. How many of our clan have spent several nights or even years under the same roof as our patriarch and matriarch in their welcoming home where the coffee and conversation flowed freely?

In the summers of my teenage years, I used to spend the night often - even bringing along my best friend Sarah - and loved the middle room upstairs with its window overlooking a slice of the front yard and its enormous pine trees. I loved Grandmama's fine garden to the back of the garage, that garden she seemed to call forth effortlessly, though I know she must have labored in it continually. I have good memories of sitting on the front porch with her, snapping green beans from that verdant plot into huge bowls.

I loved Grandmama's colorful flower borders by the front walkway, now gone.

...and the raised flower bed and outdoor seating area in back that Grandpa built

...the knickknacks, multiple prints of famous artwork, and abundant furnishings that my Aunt Stephie helped to collect, mostly from yard sales

and the spacious park at the end of the street where Grandmama and I used to walk before stopping in a little cafe to get smoothies or coffee.

Just last October I was in that house, and as usual an abundance of family was there - some I did not expect to but was overjoyed to see - and a new little dog whom I had not met, and the coffee percolated constantly in an industrial-sized coffee machine.

My Grandmama died more than six years ago, but I sat with Grandpa out back beneath the awning he had made as he told stories about his wife, including all the classic ones about how jealous she could be, once telling a waitress to "Get your damn hands off my man!" I love those stories, because I am a jealous woman myself, and they explain where I got it from.

Grandpa was starting to forget things, and there were so many people around, and so he asked me which one I was. I told him I was Hillary, nicknamed Hoodoo, and I reminded him of the time I lived with him and Grandmama for a brief time in Boise after my family moved back to Idaho from Tennessee and how I disliked my new school so much  - built like a prison with slivers for windows! - and was so slow getting up and ready for it that Grandpa, who loved to tease, called my walk to the bus stop (or ride if I were running late) the Hoodoo Trail of Tears.

His eyes lit up with the memory, and he exclaimed, "That's right!" and chuckled afresh.  (It was a story he retold every time I saw him, but I had to tell it this last time.)

On Tuesday I found out Grandpa had passed away, not even a month after we lost my Grandfather Hylton. Our family's grief is compounded. My mom and dad have each lost a parent. My siblings and I have lost both our grandpas. It's a summer for grieving.

I won't hear Grandpa call me Hoodoo again or see that tell-tale twinkle in his eye or hear him chuckle at his own stories.

I won't get another chance to ask him about his service in WWII or the crazy adventures of his unusual childhood.

And I am so sad and heartbroken for my darling mother, his daughter.

But I am sure that whenever we may enter that house again, even while now missing both Grandpa and Grandmama terribly and feeling their absence keenly, it will still be brimming with family and love.

As time goes by

I cried this morning at my younger children's school, and it took me by surprise. I walked around, trying to avoid eye contact and keep my hat pulled low. It always stinks to not have a tissue when you need it.

It wasn't Gabriella and Daniel's first day back. They're in third and first grade, but they started last week.

The tears started because as I surveyed their school campus this morning, I missed my oldest daughter's presence there. Analisa started at a large public middle school today, the one her big brother Berto attends.  

It's a school where I can't walk in and stroll around with her as we talk, laugh or sing with our arms linked.

All last year when she was still a sixth grader we did just that in the mornings until the bell rang. My younger kids ran off to play as long as possible with peers, but Analisa eagerly returned to me after putting her backpack away. Sometimes I worried that I should push her to go make more friends or hang out with a close friend instead of remaining close by mom, but I confess, too, that I loved that time together and cherished it, because I knew we wouldn't always have it.

And now we don't.

And it just hit me all of a sudden this morning on her first day at her new school, a school where I drop her off at the gate after giving her a long hug in the car. Standing alone, I looked across the tot lot and basketball courts of the school she attended for seven years, and I saw that time had passed by and taken something precious with it. I tried to control my emotion, blindsided, but I soon realized there was no hope for it, and when an acquaintance asked me how I was, I babbled about Ana's first day of middle school, trying to explain.

I was grateful that Gabriella and Daniel, who normally only want a hug and kiss st the last moment as they prepare to walk into class, found me. Daniel embraced and squeezed me. Gabriella, sensing something, held my hand and walked with me for a bit.

Observation became my companion this morning, too, and I saw the profound gift of familial bonds everywhere. I saw older siblings holding the hands of their younger brothers and sisters, showing them the way and speaking encouragement. I watched parents of kindergartners gently extricate themselves from their little ones after a last kiss goodbye. I understood the tears of the little girl who didn't want to be separated from her older sister for the day after the bell had rung.

My husband Matthew said I would be glad when our kids went back to school, and I assured him my emotions would be mixed. Obviously, there have been some rough days this summer. Those wore me down, definitely, but there were really good days, too, built around fun games, visits with friends and nature excursions.

So...just like a mother who prays for her toddler to go down for a nap, not knowing how desperate she may become if she doesn't, feels while watching her sleeping child's lovely face that the house is suddenly too quiet, so I knew it would be for me when summer break ended.

All good things come to an end. I just didn't realize how much I would miss them.

Mow down your sadness, take pleasure in growing things

I was supposed to be somewhere else on Saturday, or, rather, on the way to somewhere else. With my four kids and my handsome man, I was meant to be driving north through Arizona toward Nevada. On Sunday, we were to meet family in Idaho - a whole lot of family including my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles on both side, a slew of cousins, my beautiful sister's family, and my brother Nate and his wife Natalie who would be there from England.

Instead on Saturday I was home thinking about all the family in Idaho. Plans had changed for reasons we could not have anticipated, and we would not be joining my family for this reunion. Though I understood that it was not best for our family to travel, I was sad and restless. I tried to keep busy, My man and I hatched a last minute plan to switch our kids' rooms around. Unfortunately, that whole project only messed up the house and unsettled me more. From that project I leapt into laundry and picking up, vacuuming and sweeping, hauling out trash and recycling, but eventually I had to give vent to my feelings in words. Noises of discontent I had already spread around our home like wicked fertilizer set to increase unhappy feelings. But I wanted the harvest to be clear.

"I hate this day!" I blurted out.

Then I cried.

I know that people used to head west in America a hundred plus years ago, and they would never see family again. That story has played out all over the world all throughout time when families have migrated. If you got news about how loved ones' lives were going, you thanked God for that small comfort, I suppose. But nowadays, if you get along with your family, you expect to see them at regular intervals, and Facebook doesn't count.

There were many things I wanted from this vacation. I wanted to introduce my Ella Belle to my grandparents, because she is the only one of my children they have yet to meet. I wanted to see my kids run around like little rapscallions with my sister Vinca's children, wanted them to experience camping together. I wished to talk with my brother Nate, because I see him now so little I feel that England has a larger claim to him than I have, and I can't remember the last time we had a long conversation about our lives. I hoped to spend plenty of time with my parents. I wanted to laugh with my relatives and eat good food together. And I yearned to raid a storage unit in Boise where tapes of my Dad's music repose in dust and dark, to snatch those tapes and gloat over my victory in salvaging them.

But the practical details of life sometimes crowd out the hopes or, if we're lucky, replace them with new ones.

I found an opportunity to make peace with my disappointment that evening. I concentrated on one of those practical little details of life. I got into holey jeans and tight, sundried sneakers that had been left on the patio too long, donned my sunglasses, and went out my back door to mow the lawn.

And that's when my sadness and I settled things. We mowed that grass together. It was work, but all things are better when you can see the green world. Better yet when you can smell, see and touch it. We began awkwardly but soon found our rhythm - pacing to and fro, backing up over stubborn clumps of vegetation, and chasing over small lowlands of dirt and patchy places more populated by pebbles than Bermuda grass. We squinted at the lawn to look for strips we'd neglected while the sun shone straight into our pupils from the west. And we smelt the sweet smell of freshly cut grass with each new swath of shortened blades. That smell was like balm, the incense for my meditation with disappointed hope.

When my job was done, not too exquisite but fine, I brought out my toddler son to walk on his little bare feet through the lawn with me, pointing out what Mama had accomplished.

Then we took a picture of our sumac tree's beautiful branches struggling beneath the August sun, and we went to inspect my pots of mini roses that are among the elite few flowers that I have succeeded in keeping alive and blooming.   My sadness didn't leave me as I roamed about my yard. It didn't fall away to nestle in the fluffy piles of grass clippings, content to decompose and grow into something new. But it did settle down and find peace, no longer struggling against reality. And that's a blessing.