#I just want to sit with my oma and my nana | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

forticulewrites · 8 years ago

Text

and not forget

this week, my grandfather turns 78,

and, here we add-

another ring on the tree, creaking

it’s only been these past few years

that I could hear the wind

I forget that time continued, even

as I felt suspended in the grey

of young adulthood, these milestones

unpredictable and intangible

the drinking age, a legal vote

I forget that time grows heavier

on the lungs and spines

of all my forebears

he is still as quiet as I remember him

like my grandmother is still as busy

blue in the corner and orange in the kitchen

I can gravitate towards

what kind of smile I want today

he still likes the kind of jokes-

longform, drawn out, the kind

you work for, work towards, the kind

that takes a special patience

to entertain

a patience I have never had

and he still likes to describe a meal

if it arrested his mind, sitting there

in his brown leather chair

with one knee up

and a glass of wine

my grandfather is a full watercolor palette

of subtleties that I

(overzealous and loud,

brash and anxious,)

might never catch, but

I watch him gently touch the edge

of my paintings, and turn them

towards his friends, towards the light

and I know, at least, the most important

of his thoughts

in May, my grandmother will turn 78

coming up on her husband, and

I can see the way her hands ache

her hair has been a mute gingersnap auburn

my whole life- I don’t

recall how old I was, but

I went to her salon, once, and watched them

bring it back to a sunshine penny

she likes the way plants curve towards the sky

in her garden

telling me all the ways a bud may bloom

and

she likes to know that those she loves

are happy

like a music box ticking, always thinking

of ways to give us all a calmer breath

she cooks like I cook, like the way she taught me

to measure once and throw things in on good faith

that your hands will guide you

and your experience will find you

something new, and bright, and

all your own

she loves seashells on ceramics,

the oak leaves crunching on the path while she walks

and there’s no way to slow her down

(though her younger sister walks faster

for every inch taller my grandmother grew)

and I still have the note she wrote me

taped to a rock on my bedroom shelf

in looping, ink-stained handwriting

telling me

please trust in yourself

my other grandfather celebrates in June

when the morning sun dries my hair too quick

and the hills are turning gold on the drive

to his house

when I was eleven, he tried his best

to mold red clay into a bowl

I was unmade on the excitement of creation

and his hands were as fragile as the ropes of earth

when my bowl grew too hot, broke apart

he offered his, and I filled it with a coin

for every time I watch his eyebrows rise in laughter

I know the way they build the bridges

and the way they harness the sea

I know the way the roads lead to Rome, and

the way those roads all lead back to me, because

with a blue striped button up and a worn out belt

I sat on the bus with him

and he spoke with the voice of every steel beam

and I remember being seventeen, with my

hair tied back, two days past a shower

stuck at home, phone in my hand

listening to him talk from the ICU in a voice like fallen wheat

left behind by the careless thresher

he told me three secrets to the periodic table, and

he told me three ways to fail geology class, and

he told me three times he thought he’d discovered fire,

before he told me he loved me as he hung up the phone

his wife, my Linda, is an August birthday

and this year she will know seventy decades

on an earth it seems she is most

determined to know

I love art museums two times out of one-

when I see them through my eyes, and then

through hers

my grandfather sits on the bench in the gift shop,

while we walk arm in arm, and she tells me

the flowers in that painting are just bright enough

and the woman who painted this could see the future, it seems,

and

this modern art installment escapes my good taste

she has an opinion on almost everything

I recall

being young, being buoyed on the fact

that she still wanted to hear mine too

and when I was half her size, she taught me

the way your legs swing back and forth on the playground

can take you high enough

to touch the clouds

I know the way her hands shelve books carefully, and

the way she raises her hands in triumphant fists

cheering her grandchildren on, on a rickety lawn chair

just this side of the chalk sports field line

I know the way she arranges berries in a bowl of yogurt, the way

we made stir fry together, the way

she read me fairy tales about the girl with the blue bull,

the girl with the nettle ointment,

the girl with ashen bones who fought the world

and won

I still know the taste of the ginger peach tea

sitting on her back porch as she told me

one day

that girl

will be you

my youngest grandmother is a September baby

born in Autumn when the California earth is still hot

and the leaves start to turn

I remember my Oma like a string of music notes, I-

remember her hands over mine

stretching just far enough to tap the ivory keys

where I couldn’t quite reach

sitting in the front row of my recital

she likes the salt air on the deck of Phil’s

and she likes it when women stand strong

she liked to show me the ways science could take me

to the stars

and the smile on her face the day we met Sally Ride

is burned onto the back of my brain

I remember sitting in the back yard

watching her laugh

as my brother and I turned the crank

of the old wooden ice cream machine

like I know the click of her camera shutter, like

I know the tap of her foot to a beat, like

I know the way she still hugged me the same

even when I grew taller than her eyes

I know her frustrated huff prying my hackysack

out of the jaws of a golden retriever

like I know how much she loves the WNBA

like I know that she fought

(fought, fights, and and will still-)

for the woman she loves

like I know that, blood or not,

her roots are still tangled with mine, and

I remember never knowing why

anyone might say she was less my grandmother

than any of the three other

like I know how hard she tried

to make sure I might never have to understand

that washed out rhetoric

that I might only be myself

and then my Nana, in December

with pink coconut cake and sweet marzipan

purple teeshirts and

she is always trying, the same way

her son is always trying

to hold all those around her up

I spent every Wednesday for a decade

in the backseat of her car

with a juice and a running river mouth

listening to her classical music station

she’s always taller than I remember

running her finger around the rim of a wine glass

and laughing, startled, when it shrieks

she printed out five paintings I put online,

and five more poems of mine

and I remember drinking lemonade on her linoleum

the way her dog scrabbled on the carpet

I remember the first time she put a paintbrush in my hand

she loves sweet flavors and special occasions

(excuses to make other people smile)

the way an iris blooms in spring

pink lemonade in a tall glass, and

I think

I learned what the face of true appreciation

for beauty was,

from watching her

when she could find something lovely in

a five nickel school play

or a broadway musical making millions on the stage

back when I could eat walnuts, she gave me

turkish delight, getting powder

on the back seat of her car

she laughed the same laugh then that she did

when she tasted pineapple on Maui

stepping foot on the islands for the first time

that summer bright

and no matter how solid she seems,

she can be moved by

the smallest of triumphs on the big screen,

and I recall- we walked among the sculptures in the MOMA,

and she said

one of these days

I’ll watch them hang

your painting on this wall

I don’t know what I will say-

when there comes a day, there always

comes a day, when the forest

finds itself missing its tallest tree

and I did not think, until I watched

the sea take another man

that as much as we can be silent, in this family

as much as we can be slow-

to speak like bared branches in the winter,

perhaps they did not know

well, I know my spine grew crooked

and I know my growing pains came late

I know my face looks like my father’s

and my heart doesn’t look like much at all

but I do not think that life without them

would have seen me be this tall

and

I forget

I forget how fast time flies

I forget the way gravity arrests us, the way

our cells might age

I forget that they can’t hear

all of the things that

I forget to say

but I think this is my promise

I won’t forget

the things they gave

#caitwrites #about my grandparents

0 notes