every sunday my grandma calls. every sunday i pick up the phone and there she is on the other line. some days we will talk for twenty plus minutes or only ten but never less than that, unless it is absolutely important and an emergency she talk to my mom. we talk about the same rotating topics: weather, my great grandparents( my great grandpa just turned 95!), my cousins (1st and 2nd generation), my school work, my job (if applicable) and my sister. sometimes we veer off topic and generally those are the most memorable ones for me, such as the time i told her that i wanted to move to new york and then we talked about how she was scared about going to toronto so i think she might, in her words, 'shit bricks' being in new york. having said that, she will always voice concern about my life decisions, such as moving to new york, and how she hopes i am safe and prays for me. my grandmother is a roman catholic polish woman who lives alone yet completely surrounded by her family. we are the farthest family to her and we live five hours away. all three of my uncles religiously visit her and the two who live within a ten minute drive to her house are always around. my grandpa used to walk in the house after work and lie on the floor in the kitchen, head resting on his hand as we talked about his day, and all of my uncles to the same thing, which is nice to see since my grandpa is no longer around.
today we talked about how my grandma acquired this white chair from my great grandparents house that i have been coveting since i was a child. they live in a home now and it's weird that no one lives in that little white house across the street from the church, my central point in explaining where and how this town functions. but that chair is symbolic of my childhood because i spent my summers in round lake, playing, working, taking mail to my great grandmother and eating jam jam cookies she just made while getting two dollars every time i came round so i could go across the street to get something at the corner store. it was almost always a kinder surprise and a pepperette. now they don't live there and i haven't seen my family in six plus years, excluding my aunt, uncle and wee cousins in the summer and at thanksgiving.
my grandma and i were never that close so long ago. it was always me and my grandpa and it felt like the two of us could take over the world. i still wonder what he would say to me if he were alive and how he would joke like everyone else in my life about me not having a boyfriend but unlike everyone else he would be happy about it. i know family is a touchy subject with my mom and even touchier a subject is the possibility of seeing that family. my uncle who came to visit this summer is the only exception because he treats her nicely and she feels like she partly raised him so they have this lovely sibling bond but everyone else is off topic. she's different, i get it, and have got it for so many years, and doesn't want to see them because they judge her. really, who doesn't judge? it just hurts because these people are supposed to love you unconditionally. i had family all around me until i was thirteen and now we have no one. i miss having that, even though the family i got stuck with are backwater hillbillies with a tendency of inbreeding (my aunt is also my third cousin). so now i want to go back and visit them and collect stories all on my own. i had a pretty rad uncle who used to be a speed freak and went to woodstock but now is a family man with horses and he takes in foster kids. my other aunt is the mother superior at a convent, my cousin just had a baby and her fiancee is in the army, my great aunt diane is one of the most fucked up people i have ever met but she still has a good time and her husband leonard used to be fascinating to me as a kid but now i see him as a sad sad man with anger issues.
point is i miss them. i miss the stories i could tell about them and the way that everyone in the that town knows me as elsie's granddaughter without an actual name. i miss picking blueberries in the summer while worrying so much that i think aged a year with every outing that we would run into a bear or a wolf or something, possibly burt reynolds, around the corner of that giant tree. i miss walking to the edge of my grandma's garden and seeing this stretch of forest that was so omnious and beautiful. i miss walking along the cemetery side of the road with my grandma on the other side because she was spooked by it. i miss swimming in the lake and that epic somersault i did in the water when i was six that i will never be able to do again. i miss watching days of our lives at one in the afternoon, eating kraft dinner in the creepy basement while my grandma worked upstairs in the post office attachment to her house. i miss it.
