My mother-in-law recently decided to downsize from her home of 35 years and move into a senior apartment not far from Nogglestead. This led me to reminisce and perhaps wallow a bit on grandmother’s house as a concept, or at least enough to produce an essayish blog post about it.
I remember when my first son was born; we were living in Old Trees, where we moved right before he was born. My sainted mother lived in Lemay at the time, as she did off and on through her life, in an 812 square foot home just two blocks from where her sister had lived most recently and within a couple miles of many other homes and apartments her family had lived in over the years. I stood at her kitchen sink during one of my Sunday morning visits and looked into her back yard. “This will be Grandmother’s House,” I thought. The boy(s) (we were planning on more than one even then, whether the second had been born or not when I had the thought) would come over and play in that back yard, probably having to dodge dog piles as my mother was not one to pick up after her dog in her back yard, but perhaps with a couple youngsters about, she would. Or I would.
But that clearly did not come to pass; she died when my oldest was two and my youngest was not yet a toddler. When we came to visit, the youngest would remain in his car seat, and the oldest would go to the refrigerator and play with the magnets on it—my aunt, the one who lived nearby, had collected them, and my mother got them when my aunt died (triggering my desire to have children). My mother also had a couple of toy cars and kid-friendly books that he could play with. When she passed, we got those magnets and those toys. When we moved to Nogglestead a couple months later, we put them on our freezer on the lower level, so the lad got some continuity in those things. He probably does not remember his grandma’s house, nor his grandma, much at all.
When I was young, we lived in Milwaukee, near my grandmother (the one who is still living) and grandfather, her mother, and my grandfather’s mother. My childhood was rife with grandparents and great-grandparents, but my families had their children younger. My Nana, as I called her then and still call her now, lived with my grandpa in a small house on 33rd Street, covered in green asbestos shingle with a one car detached garage that held the Noggle and Son Contractors van (just a blue van with no writing on the side—probably one of many such in series). They’d raised their family in that house—and, as a matter of fact, my youngest aunt still lived with them in the basement down the stairs and behind a beaded curtain (it was the 1970s, man).
My Grams Great, my grandpa’s mother, lived for a while when I was young in the home in Whitefish Bay that she had shared with her husband and had presumably raised my grandpa. My brother and I spent a couple days with her there when we were young, perhaps a couple of weeks in different summers, and she took us to Vacation Bible School at her church on Santa Monica. She moved in with Nana and Grandpa at some point and stayed in their guest bedroom for a while.
My Nana’s mother lived out in Watertown with her second husband in a small house that they’d lived in for a while. We only went out there a couple of times for dinner; I recall Dick, my step-great-grandfather, had built a house and tableau out of popsicle sticks that he was very proud of, and after dinner, while the adults talked, my brother and I roamed the family room with its strange accumulated bric-a-brac. Memory triggers gathered over time for them, but weird and esoteric things to elementary school children.
On one side of my family, in Milwaukee, I remember that stability, that eternity, that always was.
My grandpa died while I was in middle school, living in the trailer park. Shortly after, my Nana moved out to the country, and she has lived there ever since. Her youngest daughter, the one from the basement, moved in with thirty years ago, and she (who is still 19ish in my mind, but I was never good at math) raised her kids on the main level whilst my Nana lived downstairs. So although it’s not as ingrained or perhaps idealized as the house in the city, I remember my grandmother’s new home as much as her old house. When I was in college, we went to that house for holiday meals—which included her mother and stepfather. When we made our first trip to Wisconsin when my oldest was but one for the only family reunion I’ve been invited to—perhaps the only one we’ve had–, it was at that house. When we visited when my nephew was young, he took a dip in her pool even though he could not swim, and on two subsequent years, my brother had to jump, fully clothed, into the pool to pull him to safety. Now that the children are out of the house (and married or using their new pilot’s license to fly all about the Midwest), she and my aunt have had the pool filled in, which is probably safer for my nephew, who I’m not sure ever learned to swim—although now, at 6’4”, he could stand in most pools safely. At any rate, I have a journal entry around here somewhere from my sophomore year of college romanticizing spending an evening with a beloved watching the snow fall from Nana’s living room. So I recall the place fondly. She’s still there, although she has talked a bit about downsizing with my aunt now that it’s the two of them.
It was quite different on the maternal side of my family.
We came down to visit my mother’s family in the St. Louis area, what, a couple of times a year? I remember a touch of my grandma’s (and grandpa’s?) place—but my grandpa died when I was four, so the memory of my grandpa is unreliable. I remember a bit of an old house with thin doors and the sound of the dachshund’s nails on the hard floor. But then my grandma lived in a trailer for a time—we stayed with her there. Then she lived in a rented house on the floodplain of the Meramac River—I remember that the living space was all on the second floor, and her second husband had his woodworking equipment in the basementy space on the first floor—and when the Meramac flooded the next time, with the waters rising mostly to the second story, they learned why. When my parents divorced and we moved to Missouri, my grandma and Herb were renting a house in High Ridge, Missouri, next to the firehouse. We moved to the trailer park in Jefferson County to be closer to her—I didn’t know at the time that she was wracked with cancer before the age of 60; I just thought she was old, and to me, sixty was it. She lived in that house for, what, four or five years, maybe just three or four, between the time we moved to Missouri(ish) and when she died from the cancer when I was fourteen—so a year after we moved to the trailer park. My freshman year of high school.
So my impressions of grandmother’s houses differed a bit on one side of the family to the other.
As you might know, gentle reader, I moved a bit when I was younger. I remember a bit of our first apartment, and then the apartment in the projects where we moved when I was four, and then the interim staying with friends for a month, and then living with my aunt for a year and a half, and then the trailer park for two or three years, and then the house down the gravel road for two and a half years until I graduated, then my father’s basement for four years of college, back down the gravel road for a little over a year, and then in my aunt’s house with my mother for a couple years….
I mean, I didn’t live like a military kid, and my early years kind of match my wife’s when she was young, when her father bounced around spots in Michigan and later Missouri working for the government. But I had grandmothers who had raised children in their houses and stayed there until they were old. Well, in their sixties and seventies and nineties.
I’ve tried to build that sort of stable life for my boys. When they graduate from high school, they will have lived at Nogglestead their entire lives. And, frankly, with little change to Nogglestead. And their great-grandmother will have lived in her home, which they have visited a couple of times, their entire lives.
And they will remember their capital-G, capital-M, GrandMother’s house. The kind-of dark home where their mother lived in when she went to high school and for a time in the midst of college after she had cancer. They’ve slept over there on many occasions, before we moved to Springfield and after. They’ve had Easter egg hunts in her backyard when it’s been cold and when it’s been warm enough to melt the chocolate before they found it. They’ve helped her, and they’ve laughed and played.
I hope they will have similar memories of her new apartment as well. And I hope our stabile domiciles will serve them well.
