Tag Archives: Grandma

No One is the Boss of Us

Posted on by under Guest, Secret Places

You know how to light a match, don’t you?

I looked up at her and lied.

7716987146_ea11952132_oShe gave me the book of matches and watched me slowly draw the bud against the scratch. She grabbed it back, You’ve got to go fast, see? Boom! Zip! She laughed and gave me the lit match with her brown wrinkled hands.

Put it in that hole there. See the flames? You just lit the grill! Now you can cook steakettes whenever you want. I confidently dropped the frozen patties from the butcher paper onto the grate.

Little girls aren’t allowed to touch matches.

* * *

Alright. We can do whatever we want today! No one is the boss of us! We can swim, play cards, eat popsicles, eat your Reese’s! It’s the Lazy Lagoon! Anything goes!

I smiled and nodded eagerly. This was every 8 year old’s dream.

I’d been in my rainbow bathing suit since 6:30am, excited for the day at my beloved Gramma’s. We started by making her big circle king bed with the furry leopard bedcover. I watched her put on bright coral lipstick, pose in the mirror, and spray White Shoulders on her neck. Then we went downstairs to make Grampa breakfast in the iron skillet before he went to work.

Go get me a beer and we’ll watch my Cubbies. I got her an Old Style from the fridge next to the TV outside in her covered patio and joined her on the black porch swing for the late morning game. I leaned on her soft arm and we rocked.

After eating I wandered around her Southside Chicago backyard. There were big bright flowers that matched my Gramma’s clothes along the high white fences, and a deep cement pool. I jumped off the diving board.

You in the pool, Aimee? Be safe in there! Don’t let the sharks getcha!

She cackled, slapped her thigh, and shouted out the Jaws theme. I rushed to the ladder and decided to clean the pool. I knew how to work the long brush without hitting the electric wires above and how to skim bugs and petals out with the net. Then I floated on the raft with my hands behind my head.

Little girls aren’t allowed to swim alone.

* * *

After a while Gramma came out from under the patio, stretched, and clapped her hands.

Who’s ready to play cards? No Go Fish. No Old Maid. We’re playing Rummy, and we’re playing for blood. You’re going to have to win fair and square.

I scrambled out of the pool, my eyes twinkling.

She shuffled the deck three different ways and flicked the cards across the table. When I won a hand she shouted, Ah! You got me, kid. But no more! and she got up, walked around her chair, and declared, The Worm Has Turned! She cursed my cards. I cursed hers. We laughed so hard.

Little girls aren’t allowed to sass grown-ups.

Before cooking dinner she went to vacuum and I walked down the kitchen stairs to the basement bar.

I loved it down there surrounded by beer signs, fancy bottles, swizzle sticks, and napkins with jokes on them. I cleaned the counter and put out glasses. I asked imaginary guests about their families, just like Gramma would ask her dozen delighted siblings and their seventy kids when any of them came over. On earlier visits I learned the boring colors – vodka, gin, bourbon, wine – did not taste good. But liquors tasted great.

I poured myself some of the emerald green Crème de Menthe, my favorite. It coated and warmed my throat. I had another.

Little girls aren’t allowed to drink.

I woke up on the floor behind the bar with my Gramma leaning over me. Hey, you alright? Come on upstairs. I stood up dazed and followed her. In the kitchen, I ate some Reese’s peanut butter cups while she cooked dinner. She bellowed out a German song, acted out scenes from The Honeymooners, and danced with her spatula. I giggled and joined her. She told dirty jokes, too.

But don’t tell your Mom. She wouldn’t like it.

* * *

We watched the best shows of the 1980s at night: Family Feud, Archie Bunker, and Facts of Life, taking breaks for popsicles and HoHo’s. The vertical blinds lazily clinked against each other in the soft breeze. The room smelled like chlorine, cold cream, and Jean Naté.

After the news Gramma brushed her teeth and put on more lipstick.

In case I die in my sleep.

I laid awake between my Gramma and Grampa, licking chocolate off my smile in the dark. I had three more days to be a grown-up with Gramma. Then my Mom would bring me home and I’d have to be a little girl again

* * * * *

aimee-fritz-bio-picAimee Fritz is an introvert who delights in telling long, true tales about everyday absurdities in her suburban life. She finally believes in an unseen God, hopes to someday feel qualified to parent her kids, and is now allergic to every food she used to enjoy. Read more of her stories about world changers, souls, and big mistakes at familycompassionfocus.com

Matches photograph by Simon D.

 

 

Ukrainian Soul Food

Posted on by under Food & Place

“Mine look like bananas!” I apologized.

I was assured that, first of all, they did not look like bananas. And even if they did, who would care? Once they’d been boiled, smothered in sautéed onions, and served with a giant dollop of sour cream, they would taste amazing.

“It’s more important that they’re sealed tightly so they won’t break apart when we boil them,” my mother assured me. “The shape doesn’t matter at all!”

It was late December, and Mom, my younger brothers, Aunt Mary, Uncle George, and I were gathered around our newspaper-covered kitchen table. Hands dusted with flour, we had each set up our individual work stations with the proper tools: a square of waxed paper, a communal canister of flour, and a narrow-mouthed cocktail olive jar, which would serve as a mini-rolling pin. When we finished our project, the olive jars would be returned to a corner of the pantry to await next year’s pierogi-making party.

In the center of the table was a wet loaf of sticky sour-creamy dough, from which Mom cut small chunks to distribute to each of our work stations. We sprinkled flour onto our waxed paper and coated our olive jars with the same, and then we rolled the dough into something approximating a circle the size of a flattened tennis ball. We dropped a spoonful of filling—either the mashed potato and cheese concoction or my favorite, the sauerkraut, onion, and cottage cheese mixture—onto one side of the circle. Then we folded the dough over and sealed the filling inside by pressing our thumbs along the edges.

Voila! A perfect pierogi.

Which may or may not resemble a banana.

***

homemade-pierogi_kz6bdbGrowing up, the pierogi-making party was an annual ritual, an Advent tradition as familiar as candles and wreaths and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” Our Christmas Eve dinner, or “Holy Supper,” followed the tradition of my father’s family, imported from his parents’ native Ukraine. It was a completely meatless meal, to follow the tradition of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. I think its original form involved multiple courses and a lot of symbolism—including straw under the tablecloth, to represent the baby Jesus’ manger birthplace. And raw garlic cloves served up like pickles or olives.

The version of Holy Supper with which I grew up was significantly abridged. We skipped the straw and the raw garlic and served only two courses: kapusta (a sauerkraut and split pea soup, which looked and smelled as appetizing as it probably sounds) and pierogies. Both of these were topped with onions sautéed in a pound or more of butter and were accompanied by unleavened bread, stuck with cloves of garlic before it was baked, and served with generous drizzles of honey. The strong flavor of the garlicky honey bread is the only thing that made the kapusta even remotely appetizing to me.

But I loved the pierogies. We would boil them on Christmas Eve, and for Christmas morning breakfast, we would fry up the leftovers in a skillet, along with the buttery onions.

***

My mother grew up a decidedly White Anglo Saxon Protestant dairy farmer’s daughter, and she used to tell me that she never tasted garlic before she started dating my father. She was raised with a predictably bland meat and potatoes diet, but she grew to love the food of her eastern European in-laws.

To my father’s delight, after a couple of false starts, she mastered how to prepare most of his childhood favorites. They often laughed about her first attempt at making halupki—or stuffed cabbage, or pigs-in-a-blanket, depending on your vernacular. She didn’t realize she had to steam the cabbage before rolling it around the ground beef and rice concoction, so she fastened the rolls together by securing them with toothpicks.

pierogiesWe ate pierogies and kapusta on Christmas Eve, and on Easter, cold kielbasa and potato salad and hard boiled eggs dipped in a shredded beets and horseradish mixture. The one delicacy of my father’s childhood that my mother never attempted to prepare is studenina: jellied pigs’ feet. My Uncle Paul likes to joke that, “You can spend an hour convincing someone that you can make jello out of pigs’ feet, and then you blow it when you tell them that you pour vinegar over it and eat it for breakfast.” My dad loved it. I’ve never been able to bring myself to taste the stuff.

***

When Mom first asked my grandmother for her pierogi recipe, Grandma shrugged. After decades of making pierogies every Friday, she cooked by instinct, not by measurement.

So Mom followed her around the kitchen, writing down everything she did to prepare the dough and mix the fillings. A pinch of this, a handful of that—with the end result enough pierogies for us to eat well that evening and for many meals to come. Our freezer would be well stocked for the twelve months that tended to lapse between pierogi-making parties. And we were following the steps my grandmother had followed week after week, when the “recipe” yielded only enough to feed my dad and his many brothers and sisters for a single meal.

The irony is not lost on me that what we have come to regard as an exotic, once-a-year treat is really eastern European peasant food—or what my dad affectionately used to call “Ukrainian soul food.”

It continues to feed our souls.

***

Amy bio YAH

Grandmothers and Fried Plantains

Posted on by under Food & Place, Guest

My grandmother assumes her regular position at the head of the table, a spot she reserved for herself after my grandfather passed away.

As the youngest of the family, I sit in the spot right next to her. It’s a privilege that I’ve proudly carried into adulthood. The ceiling fan is running, creating a whirlwind of mucky, humid air. It’s always humid in India, but it was summertime when I visited that year, so the humidity was more like a sweat-fest. The fifth floor of the apartment building invited some cool, coastal breeze every now and then, but it was never strong enough to drive away the mugginess.

My grandmother, or mummy as I call her, opens the container of fried plantains, a treat she got while I was out earlier that day. I smile – she remembered that I loved these when I was little.

I take a bite, sip the chai, then smile. Even though I was only visiting for a couple of weeks, it didn’t take much for that muggy apartment to feel like home. Mummy knew how to make it home for me.

493422234_7cca94f8bf_oI slowly start to peel off the battered outer shell. It was sweet, crunchy and drenched in oil, and oh my gosh, did it taste like heaven. I look over to find mummy doing the same. We catch each other’s gaze and chuckle.

“I forgot that you like the outer shell as well!” I exclaim, quite amused.

Mummy doesn’t reply and continues eating. But she doesn’t bother hiding her smile.

Other than our love for fried plantains, we don’t have a lot in common.

Mummy thinks girls should know how to cook, garden, sew, brush their hair, make their beds, and walk properly. I think that women should do whatever the heck makes them happy (for me, this does not include cooking, gardening, sewing, brushing my hair, making my bed or walking like a proper lady, whatever that means). Naturally, we argued a lot over the years. Every time she would begin her lecture with “As a girl you MUST…” I would roll my eyes and suppress the urge to return my “GIRLS CAN DO WHATEVER THEY DAMN WELL PLEASE” speech.

But lately, she doesn’t lecture me. We don’t argue or bicker. We sit in silence, mostly. There are some awkward attempts at small talk, but mostly just silence.

I want to ask her to repeat the stories she used to tell me, but I cower. I’m afraid that if she tells me these stories again, that it will be the last time I will hear them. But oh, how I yearn to hear her say the words once more. I want her to tell me what she’s feeling, what she’s thinking, her hopes, her dreams, her heartaches, her delights. I wonder if she wants to hear my stories and my thoughts. Compared to what she has given me — the tales, adventures and wisdom of a life that was so fully-lived — what do I have to offer? I don’t really have much to tell or offer. And yet, I want to give her so much. Time is slipping, and I am afraid that I will never get a chance to give her something, anything.

“Do you want another one?” Mummy asks.

I shake my head and put the last piece of the outer shell in my mouth.

Mummy tears off a chunk of her outer shell and puts it on my plate.

I want to refuse and put it back onto her plate, but I don’t. Instead I offer her a smile and some unspoken sentiments.

She doesn’t acknowledge it, but I can tell that she’s received it. She has heard me.

*   *   *   *   *

281098_10151282727211057_1010424170_o“Grandmothers and Fried Plantains” is by Leah Abraham. Leah is a storyteller + writer + journalist + creative + empathizing romantic + pessimistic realist + ISFP + Enneagram type 2 + much more. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, loves the great indoors and hates to floss. Also, she is obsessed with Korean food, sticky notes and her dorky, immigrant family. Leah occasionally blogs at www.leahabraham9.wordpress.com.

The photograph of fried plantains used in this post was taken by Rahul Sadagopan.

The Road to Grandma’s House

Posted on by under Memory & Place

Run for 45 seconds, walk for 30. Repeat. For six miles. Go.

It was Saturday morning along the misty Allegheny river, and we were running, then walking, and running again. Blessedly, I was not in charge of the stopwatch. I was checking out a run-walk club, and our leader timed all the transitions.

“Walk for 30!” she hollered. I slowed my pace and made eye contact with the woman beside me. “I’m glad that she tells us what to do,” I said. She grinned, “Is this the first time you’ve done this?” I nodded. “Are you new to the area?”she asked. “No, I’ve been in Pittsburgh for fifteen years. And I grew up visiting my grandparents, just outside of town in Verona.” Her smile widened, “Oh, that’s where I live! Where did…”

“Run for 45!” We paused until the next break.

“Walk for 30!” We walked, and my new friend re-started the conversation. “I didn’t expect to be living in Verona,” she confessed, “But a friend of the family, an older lady who had been taking care of her brother and sister wanted to sell her house, and it’s just a few doors down from my parents. It all happened suddenly, but seemed like the right thing to do.”

At this point I almost stopped walking, nearly tripping the run-walker behind me.

“Wait, this older lady with the brother and sister, what was her name?”

And she said my grandma’s name. My grandma, who had taken care of my great-aunt and great-uncle in her house in Verona. Then the daughter of her long-time neighbors bought her house because it seemed like the right thing to do. I had heard this story before.

“That’s my grandmother’s house!” I exclaimed, and now she almost stopped (we were really annoying the people behind us). “You’re the granddaughter who lives in Pittsburgh?” she asked, astonished, as if I had just run-walked off the pages of a novel she was reading. “Yeah, that’s me,” I replied.

“Run for 45!” the command came again, and the timing was perfect.

We both needed 45 seconds to process these revelations.

* * * * *

It was an hour in the car from my hometown to grandma’s driveway, and as a child the ride seemed endless. So I counted landmarks: the Harmerville Exit off 28. The Eat n’ Park by the movie theater. The purple bridge. The Dairy Queen. The street with all the flags, and then the turn up the hill, past the Italian restaurant. A turn off the main road and then the winding suburbs of yellow and red brick houses, nearly identical except for a striped awning here, a rhododendron bush there.

“We’re almost there,” I would inform my brothers. “Doh!” one of them would inevitably respond. “Stop hitting your brother!” came the call from the front seat. But none of this mattered. We had finally arrived.

The driveway crunched under the car tires as we pulled around back. We always, always entered grandma’s house through the back door. The front door was for guests. The back door was for family.

As we piled out of the car, there were longing looks at the neighbor’s pool, and then we plunged into the cool, musty dimness of the garage and basement. Sasha and Peeko greeted us with a swish of cat tails against our legs. We paused by the piano that lived in the basement and banged on the keys, one of my parents scolding us to stop-that-horrible-racket.

We stopped. The stairs drew us forward, then up, as we announced our arrival with voices and loud clomping. The door at the top of the basement steps was closed, but soon it would swing open.

And Grandma and Grandma’s house were right behind that door.

* * * * *

After much friendly reminiscing, my run-walker friend and I exchanged e-mails. “Come and visit,” she said, “you’re always welcome.” I promised to be in touch and went to my car, calling my mom while I was still in the parking lot. “You’ll never guess who I met!” And my mom was, of course, thrilled. “Are you going to go and visit?” she asked, and I started to respond that of course I was, and did she want to join me, but then… I paused for a long time.

“Jen?” she asked. “I’m not sure,” I stammered, surprising both of us, “I’ll have to think about it.”

Suddenly, it was a lot to process. Suddenly, I felt protective of my childhood memories. Grandma’s house was grandma’s house after all, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted a dose of grown-up reality, of inevitable change, to cloud the pictures in my mind.

So much has already changed.

“I’ll have to think about it,” I told my mom on the phone, and several months later, I’m still thinking about it. Not because I’m afraid of what I’ll find there–I’m certain that the house has been well-maintained and cherished in its new life with a new family.

It’s just that I know what will be missing.

Like the old fridge with the curved corners, with chilled dishes of red jello on the bottom shelf. Or the egg-crate mattresses folded in the closet, waiting for me and my cousins and brothers to line them up for a sleepover. The familiar afghans on the orange-yellow sofa. Grandma’s neat piles of papers. Sasha and Peeko. The golf-tee triangular peg game thingee!

How can grandma’s house exist without a golf-tee triangular peg game thingee?

But mostly I know that grandma won’t be there, behind the door. She lives in Michigan now, in a lovely senior high-rise with multiple pianos, none (I assume) in the basement. I can visit her there, and we can jump golf tees together. But her house?

I’m still not sure I want to visit. My run-walker friend would probably welcome me–graciously–through the front door.

11721057_10152889720121402_1050069583_o11665068_10152889720116402_388526683_o

These pictures are thanks to my cousin, Mike (next to me on the couch) and I include them with much love to my all my cousins, including Mike, Melissa (shortest blonde in line-up), and Chrissy (blonde in white dress). The blonde on the far left is a neighbor named Jennifer, we think, which is likely since she was female in the 1980s. I am, as always, the tall brunette. Much love also to my un-pictured brothers whom I appreciate so much more now that we never, ever, ride in the back of a car together.

The Creek Less Traveled

Posted on by under Memory & Place

There were many bodies of water to enjoy and explore at my grandparents’ cabin—it was Northern Michigan, after all, where bodies of water are as common as fields of corn where I live now, in Central Illinois.

The small, inland lakes had their appealing features: sandy shores for digging, floating rafts to dive from, and glass-like surfaces that perfectly mirrored the evening sky until the canoe you paddled broke through the stillness.

But of the many tempting bodies of water, it was the creek that enticed me most. The creek had something the lakes didn’t: It had mystery, a destination.

*    *    *    *    *

We called it simply The Creek, but on a detailed-enough map it has a proper name: Canada Creek. It probably winds for miles, but our encounters with the creek took place in the far upper-east corner of Michigan’s lower peninsula—right where the cuticle of your index finger would settle in the mitten-shaped map.

As elementary-aged kids, my older brother and I were allowed to walk together down a curving sand road until it became a one-lane bridge at the creek. The road was rarely traveled, like all the roads in the area—we were somewhere in the midst of 20 square miles of woods and water known as Canada Creek Ranch (only a fourth of which was dotted with a few hundred cabins).

At the creek, my brother and I stood on the bridge for a while, tossing stones into the water to hear them plink and plunk their varying notes. Then we slid and scrambled down the gravely bank to the creek’s shore, where we inevitably ditched our canvas sneakers and sweaty socks to wade in the cold, clear spring water. It was sandy and shallow by the bridge; I liked to stand very still, hoping a dragonfly might land on me, while the tadpoles investigated my toes.

But how long could a kid stand still in a creek? After all, the creek had places to go and things to show us.

*    *    *    *    *

PICT0023I’m guessing that we schemed and planned our first creek walk when I was about seven, sitting around Grandma’s breakfast table, pancakes piled high and studded with wild blueberries we had picked the day before. I’m sure my brother and I were persuasive in our desire to follow the creek. Not only did it beg to be further explored, but the creek held potential for so many stories. The grownups were apparently just as intrigued, because a new summer tradition was born (one that continued into our teen years, as seen in the photo): The Creek Walk.

On Creek Walk day my brother and I set out as adventurers, eager to play the characters in our favorite books—to live out their stories, or more likely a compilation of their stories. Laura Ingalls, Davey Crockett, Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea each took a turn being embodied by us as we forged the stream.

Sometimes we talked through our stories as we walked, staying in character as we navigated over or under a fallen tree. At other moments I broke from character to yelp as I slipped on a rock and nearly went under, or to complain when my brother, leading the way, fooled us with his favorite trick: gradually bending his knees then walking on them until the water was up to his neck, which suggested it would be well over my head. (A few times he wasn’t joking, and it actually was that deep.)

And then there were spells when all of us were quiet, amazed by just how quiet the world could be, save for the swish of our legs displacing the water as we walked, and the song of a Goldfinch from somewhere above. Now that I think of it, I don’t recall ever encountering another person on our many creek walks.

*    *    *    *    *

After three or so hours of pressing on, the heat and deer flies became more bothersome, as did the ache in our legs and the rumble in our stomachs. Grandma began searching for a place to exit the creek—an opening in the tangle of brush where the bank wasn’t too steep and we could make our way from the creek’s winding world into the woods.

How Grandma had any idea where we were, I’ll never know. But she had hiked and skied those acres for years, and could confidently point us in the direction of Little Joe, one of the remote lakes on Canada Creek Ranch. We followed deer paths or forged our own way in the direction she pointed, motivated by what we knew we would find at our destination: Grandpa, firing up the grill for hotdogs. Each year on Creek Walk day he put the cooler Grandma had prepared into the car and drove the two-track roads through the woods to meet us at Little Joe’s lone picnic table.

After our feast, we all packed into Grandpa’s car, soggy and worn, to drive back to the cabin. The hotdogs and the lift home were luxuries Sacajawea never had, but by that point I was ready to be a modern-day little girl again, tucked into bed where more creek adventures could be spun in my dreams.