Artifacts

When I hung out at my aunt and uncle's cabin on the lake, I wandered through their rooms and admired the lovely pieces they've collected and restored. Mixed in and about their country furnishings and my aunt's quilts, were bits and pieces from my grandparents' house. As we walked from room to room, we pounced upon these treasures, exclaiming with delight and emotion over my grandmother’s ornately carved dresser, my grandfather’s ancient Bakelite radio, and the big white sugar bowl with the worn, metal lid. I greeted the items like long lost relatives and happily dinged the old school bell that used to be on my grandparent’s credenza and now lived on my uncle’s breakfast counter. I was happy to see the nostalgia my uncle had for these inconsequential objects and curious to see them  up in the mountains, so far away from their old home in the cavernous gray house with the pink shutters perched next to the exit ramp to the interstate. 

It was also a little odd to see my aunt and uncle in a cabin in the mountains on the edge of a lake. They also were far removed from their origins in ethnic, metropolitan New York where we tend to classify people by their families' country of origin. My own kids like to consider themselves "Italian", although they are four generations removed from Italy on my mother's side and three on my father's (not to mention that my husband is a very decided mix of Irish and Anglican ancestry). Coupled with this ancestral jingoism is the desire to yank up our roots as easily as carrots pulled out of sandy soil and reinvent ourselves on California shores or Montana mountains.  As each generation travels farther and farther abroad in search of jobs and lifestyle, those that stay behind grieve this generation’s inability to stay in one place and treasure family values. But search the attics of the ones who grieve,  and you’ll find the steamer trunks of their parents and their parents’ parents that carried their Bibles and pots  across the ocean in steerage.

When my husband and I bought our first house, we moved 35 miles from our home town. My grandmother was very upset that we were so “far away”, and she squawked that she’d never make the hour ride and would fuss and protest, but eventually my sister or my father would wedge her into the back seat where she and my aunt would talk nonstop up the Taconic Parkway, like two prisoners let out for the day.  My grandmother, like many older people, disliked change and preferred to have her family brooding under her wings. When she moved from Elizabeth Street in lower Manhattan, to the suburbs in Westchester, she lived in a layer cake of family in a three family house, with her parents under her on the first floor and her sister's family above her on the third. Even when my grandparents finally bought their own home, they took my newly wedded parents with them and moved a mere  mile away.

The  unusual fact was not that they lived in a layer cake, but that the cake ever got baked in the first place.  I’ve never understand how any one of them had the courage to leave everything they’ve ever known and risk all to go to America to find work and homes and a life for their families. It‘s not hard to understand my grandmother‘s desire to keep all her family under one roof for as long as she could when you consider that her parents sailed from Italy and settled here with their aunts and uncles and cousin because that is what you did: you took risk, but you lived your life with your family hand in hand, or what was the point in the first place?

We’ve been luckier than many families I know. Although my own family moved across country for seven years, we moved back here to square one. My older sister has lived in Florida and North Carolina for many years and will probably never live in New York again. My uncle’s children live upstate, having found jobs and spouses close to where they went to college. It’s only natural that my uncle should pick a second house nearby his own grandchildren, phasing in a new life in preparation for retirement.

The grey house with the pink shutters casts a long shadow, and we feel its shade even 200 miles in the frozen inner core of upstate New York.  We all  carry the house on our backs like snails no matter how far we our trail leads into the world. Sometimes we are happy to doze in its shade and other times we are desperate to escape the gloomy rooms and disappear into the sun.  We may have divvied up the china and shipped the furniture all over the state, but the icon is intact in our memories. The stories that emanate from my grandparents’ house are as intertwined in our identities as their sugar bowls and salt cellars are in our homes. We reinvent uses for the stained glass that hung in the landing window, and set the holiday table with our great-grandmother’s stemware. We take these chipped pieces with us, packing cracked flowerpots in newspaper and holding them on our lap as we drive South and click the states off like rosary beads in our fingers. Husbands patiently wait for us to tie a broken down rocker on the roof of the minivan, securing it with a tarp that flaps and must be retied frequently on our thousand mile road trip. And we line the pockets of our suitcases with old matchbooks, used bakery twine, and forty years’ worth of Christmas cards.

What do we hope to learn from these pieces of cardboard and strings from the past? Are we merely accumulating layers of  our past to provide fodder for the next generation’s archeological dig? Or are we surrounding ourselves with talismans to ward off the evil eye of loneliness and provide us with the company of those that have gone before?

Unlike his younger brother, my mother’s other brother is very dispassionate about these sentimental pieces of crockery and sticks. He took precious little from the grey house, and plowed through the floors of belongings with a take no prisoners mentality. He couldn’t feel the resonance of my aunt’s paperweights in his hand and he felt no longing for maple sideboard or the Dresden vases. He was the older brother who took care of my grandmother’s and aunt’s bills, the Social Security checks, the leaky pipes, and the squirrels in the attic.  He meticulously did their taxes and made countless trips to the bank to deposit the rent checks.  He was the child they called in the middle of the night when Momma was ill or the furnace went out. Not to say that he didn't love them deeply. He bore the awful burden of telling the family of my aunt's diagnosis and he could barely utter the words.  I think he feels no need to surround himself with memento mori because he still carries their voices in their heads and wakes up with a start when the temperature is in the teens, wondering if the furnace has gone off at Anita’s. He feels the pull of the big gray house as strongly as the tides feel the full moon and having finally escaped above the high tide line, he does not want to wade at the shore.

That weekend at the cabin, we were all  exhausted from either skiing or watching my uncle’s grandchildren play like puppies in the snow. We’d had a big family meal together, and spent a few hours drinking wine and reminiscing about all the childhoods we had shared: my uncle’s, my sisters, his children‘s, and now his grandchildren’s. I was aware of the new layers of family rising like yeast from within, with my cousin, his eldest daughter,  now taking up the slack of holiday dinners for their family, and my  uncle and aunt now the indulgent grandparents who babysat and gave the kids bubble baths in their huge, slipper tub in front of the window that looked out on the frozen lake.  I watched the easy familiarity their grandchildren had in their grandparents’ cabin, knowing where the crayons were and the tray - my grandmother’s - that they used to make their bead mosaics, and which was the best window to watch the flicker woodpecker at the bird feeder. I thought about how different their lives were from the extended family that lived in the grey house with pink shutters, and yet how very alike it was after all.

That night, my sister and I slept in twin beds in the guest room. I read awhile after she went to sleep, and when I was ready to turn out the light, I leaned over to put my book on the floor. I almost fell out of bed when I saw an old, black telephone on the bottom shelf of the nightstand. It  was the telephone that  had been at the foot of the stairs in my grandparents’ basement for fifty years. Its wall cord was dangling and disconnected, but the faceplate in the middle of the metal rotary dial still had the original, yellowed cardboard disc that displayed their old telephone number: 632 5035. I grabbed the phone with two hands and placed it on my lap. It was very heavy and I stared at it for a few minutes and thought about the little table it used to sit on in the nook by the cellar door.  I lifted the cold receiver to my ear and listened with a stir of butterflies in my stomach, expecting, hoping, fearing to hear a dial tone, but nothing more than silence greeted me. I looked over at my sister to make certain that she was still gently snoring. With no one as my witness, I  whispered into the receiver, “Grandma? We’re up in the mountains. Come on up, you’ll enjoy the ride.” I put the receiver down and replaced the phone quickly, before anyone saw me and knew I’d lost my mind.