Photo by pmv chamara on Unsplash
The first time I got my tarot cards read, a woman with fly away grey hair and a loose shawl sat across a small circular table from me and insisted that a female presence was watching over me. I nodded politely, while secretly thinking what a load of shit. I told my mom. That’s your great-grandmother, she said.
I never met my Mema, but I learned her through stories. My mom used to go to her house every day after school to play the piano. I imagine it warm, with wood panelling and music and the smell of cookies (something about grandparents means cookies to me). She and Pop took her to every piano lesson she ever had, and Mema would say, “Erin, go out and play me a little Danny Boy.” I think of rich sounds and ivory keys when I think of my mother’s youth with them. “She was the kindest person to ever live,” my mom would say.
I knew my Pop, my grand-grandfather, until he died when I was eight years old. I know how their house smelled. I have it captured in one of his old poetry books. I used to sit at the top of the stairs when I was a kid, cross-legged in front of the small, wooden bookshelf. I would leaf through to find the ones with the biggest font. My favorite was Robert Frost. I liked to imagine Pop reading it by the fireplace with a cup of hot cocoa in his hands. Come to think of it, I can’t quite remember if the house even had a fireplace.
On this bookshelf, there was a thin, turquoise book. Hardcover. The pages were thick, like it was more about the illustrations than the words. It was a poem, just one, spread out over the course of twenty or thirty pages, each one delicately strewn with the most beautiful watercolor flowers, branches, leaves. I imagined it was Mema’s, that hers was the delicate, flowery one while Pop’s was the sturdy, burnt orange one.
I got two things when my Pop died. I don’t remember how they came to me, but I still have them in my possession. Two books. I try not to open them, to preserve the scent.
I never really considered myself to have grandparents, my mother being estranged from her parents and my father living two time zones away from his. My favorite visits were to Pop’s house when I was a kid. They’re the only memories I have of grandfather, even though he wasn’t even mine.
Something about Mema that made me wish I had a grandmother: My mom says when Pop would leave for work in the morning, she would lift up the covers in her bed and say “Climb in hunny bunny” and they would cuddle up close. I imagine being a kid in a giant bed, and I crave the touch of a woman who was always soft, skin and all.
I have trouble imagining my Mema in the house my Pop used to live in. It was small, two stories, with a shed out in the backyard, and ceilings that were low, even for a child. I imagine her somewhere grander. I imagine them both somewhere grander. High ceilings and fireplaces and armchairs with tall backs. Joni Mitchell and Norah Jones. I imagine it filled with my young mother, little leo, her joy and her pain and her music.
When I asked my mom her favorite things about Mema, she first said “Everything was my favorite thing. She was my favorite person,” and then she painted a mural of detail for me made of syrup sandwiches on white bread and red pansies and walks by the little brook I used to love as a kid and the smell of powder. Patient, always patient. And reading to my mom. I imagine the books in her small hands, lined with age and blue veins, but still so soft.
When I moved into my first apartment, my mom was there to help me out. I went downstairs to the truck to grab something, and when I returned, there were tears in her eyes, though she tried not to show it. You Come Too was on her lap. She asked if she could borrow it. I don’t think she ever read it, just opened it every now and then to remember something of the family she loved.
Pop used to collect jelly jars. Collect or hoard, I’m not sure. Every time he finished a jar of jelly, he washed out the stickiness and put it in his cabinet to use for juice. I loved them. My mother got them when he died, and when I go home I still drink orange juice out of the little glasses, barely taller than my middle finger. They seemed much larger when I was a child.
Something about Pop that made me wish I had a grandfather: When my mother was a small child, before she had grown into a small adult, her teacher complained that she wasn’t getting the right hand positions on the piano because she was sinking down so far to reach her little legs to the floor. Pop, ever handy, took a block of wood and sanded it, polished it, varnished it, stuck rubber on the bottom of it so it wouldn’t slide. He placed it under my mom’s feet, and dropped her off at her next piano lesson where she beamed at her own hands on the keys.
I remember sleeping over at my Pop’s house when I was a kid, my sister and I in the back room on the first floor, right next to the dining room and the kitchen. There were little toy trucks with boxes in the backs that I would take out and try to make them fit in again, like a puzzle. It was in this room that I first tried to read the Bible, starting in the middle, but the font was too little and the pages too thin.
My mom used to sleep in the same room when she would stay the night as a child. I feel a sort of kinship with her as we talk about how we both remember hearing Pop getting up in the morning. He drank his coffee black and burnt his toast. You could hear him every morning scrape scrape scraping the black bits off of his charred bread. It was the way he liked it. The sound meant it was time to wake up. More juice in jelly jars.
Pop was a tank mechanic in World War II, but he didn’t like to talk about it. He would only tell stories of his friends, their jokes, the joy he found amidst tragedy. He carried a round, metal lunchbox to work as a janitor at the high school. He was small, shorter than I am now, but ever looming large in my memory. Or my fantasy.
Mema never worked. She never learned how to drive. She was safe with Pop. I imagine her embroidering, sewing flowery pillows and flowing dresses and long curtains for the floor to ceiling windows that exist only in my imagination. I don’t know if she did any of these things. I dream them, though.
They bought my mom her first piano when she was eleven. I remember its light wood and square build, an upright that looked worn and loved. It was the same piano I learned to play on.
Something Mema and Pop taught me even after their deaths:
In all these facts, a world is built.
Two worlds, really, one of imagination and dream, one of truth and reality.
Built in the pages of poetry books, the smell of powder, the scraping of burnt toast.
And I think my imagined family might have been better than any real one I could ask for.
I think love is just as strong for those you never met.
I love them for taking care of my mother, firing in her the woman I love dearly.
I love them for what I remember and what I imagine, what’s real and what’s not.
I love them in the grandness of dream and the mundanity of reality.
There they are, ever looking over me.
Amelia Clare Wright is a student of Columbia's MFA program in nonfiction creative writing. She has work appearing in Oyster River Pages, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and The Hunger Journal. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is currently working on a memoir about mental illness and trying to decide if she wants to be a coral reef or a tree when she dies.