Mamaw's Things

There. I was ready for the carpet cleaners. I threw myself down on the couch I had just temporarily moved into the dining room and closed my eyes for a minute. I opened them again just in time to see the evening sun come out from behind the clouds and light up the glassware on the table with amber colored fire. Whitehall Cubist iced tea glasses graced all six place mats around the table. A Whitehall pitcher overflowing with napkin covered silverware and an amber Tear Drop cake plate bookended the table settings.
Those glasses, I reflected, had been a part of my life as long as I could remember. They had been a part of my grandmother's thanksgiving table since before I was born. And in fact, the table they were sitting so gracefully on now had been my grandmother's table. Looking at them I had a feeling of time out of place. It didn't seem like it could have elapsed so fast. It seemed like just yesterday that she was serving iced tea out of those glasses while we all sat around the table and laughed as we dined on the Thanksgiving dinner she had prepared for us all.
It didn't seem right to me on the day that I acquired those dishes that I should have them. It was all happening too fast and too soon. I knew it had been a hard choice for my relatives to give her things away, and an even harder decision to put her in the nursing home, but it had to be done and given the circumstances, giving away her things was not only the best thing to be done, I think it would be what she wanted. In fact I would even go so far as to say that if she had known she would have Alzheimer's she would have given her things away to whoever wanted them long ago.
I would give anything if she could have her things back. I would give anything if just for one day she would look at me and smile and say "well, hello, Julie Anne, how are you today?"
But such things are beyond her now. She is with us but not with us. Her body is here but her mind wanders the fields of her childhood. She speaks of her mother and daddy and of picking beans and cotton in the present tense, though her mother and daddy have both been dead for nearly forty and fifty years, respectively.

On the day that I acquired the glasses I also picked up a glass apple that nobody else seemed to want. I remembered where it sat in her house. I wondered how the stem of the apple broke off. I took it home and put it on my window sill. Sometimes I walk by and just pick it up and put my hands around it. It is very comforting to me that my grandma's hands held this very apple not so far distantly. I wish I could convey the feeling I have inside, of this generational kinship, to my children. But they do not understand, and how could they possibly? They never sat around her table or had chickpeas from her garden. They never had her homemade iced tea or her turkey stuffing at Thanksgiving or her Red Velvet Cake at Christmas. They never heard all her funny idioms or her southern dialect or saw her take a garden rake out of the closet and proceed to rake the carpet. She never took them to the "shopping center" or showed them how to properly shampoo their hair. She never showed them how to make homemade gravy or how to make creamed corn from fresh corn on the cob. They never sat in the patio swing with her on a long summer evening and listened to the frogs in the garden as the night closed in. By the time they were old enough to remember who she was she was already sliding into her twilight haze of dementia.
But watching the shadows change as the clouds play tag with the sun, I make a vow to my grandmother. I will remember you to my children, and in the end they will love you and your things as much as I.