14 April 2015 "On Juniata Street"

My paternal grandmother lives in Havre de Grace, Maryland, in a large, whitewashed house with a backyard seemingly too big for its weak chain-link fence. She has lived there through the entirety of my life, and a large majority of my father’s. It is a house that’s been much too big for her since my grandfather passed away about ten years ago, but she’s always found excuses to stay amidst everyone else’s excuses to leave.

            Havre de Grace is a quaint town inhabited by about 14,000 people. Situated on the banks of the Susquehanna River, it boasts of its many waterfront attractions, including a marina and a fairly new boardwalk (BayDreaming.com). My grandmother and I always enjoyed walking the length of the boardwalk together, and, after she got her dog Rudy, we brought him along with us; it’s a short walk from the front gate of her yard to the water. Though this is beautifully convenient in summer, flooding hazards during hurricane season present a problem not only to my grandmother, but also to the town, which is extremely low-lying. I’ve seen main streets so waterlogged that people could row kayaks down them instead of driving.

            I must have been to Havre de Grace two thousand times in my life, but the town holds only small memories for me. What I remember most is my grandmother’s backyard, clothed in sunshine and comfortable enough to forgo all but one thin layer of clothing.

            I distinctly recall this little green pool that was shaped and painted like a turtle. I’m sure now it wouldn’t even reach my ankles if I stepped in and it was full of water, but I can remember splashing in it for entire afternoons, the sun shining blindingly, the grass green and fresh as she mowed it. When I got older, my cousins and I would explore the reaches of the vast chain-link fence, and upon one excursion we found the turtle pool leaned against it, buried underneath a storm of orange pine needles and snapped twigs. We stomped on its back, and yet the turtle’s painted face smiled on.

            The best times at my grandmother’s yard were the days when my mom let Cinnamon come spend the day with me. Cinnamon is my dog, young though he was then. Cinnamon and her dog, Rudy would spend hours running together and rolling happily in the grass. I could never keep up with them, and often blamed my lack of two extra legs, but I was happy anyway to see Cinnamon so ecstatic to be alive. Alive is the way it felt then, to be in my grandmother’s backyard. It was a different kind of reality, the type that seemed to move much more slowly. I didn’t realize the way time moved then, didn’t have to. I saw things in a limited perspective: if it wasn’t visibly changing, I didn’t see it. Only later did I realize that things don’t change around us, we change around them.

            My grandparents met in Germany during World War II. He was there because of his involvement in the military; it was where she had been born and raised. It was the age-old story: they fell in love, she moved across the ocean, they adapted each other’s customs and adopted the responsibility of each other. When he got sick with pancreatic cancer, I barely knew him but I knew she never for a second left his side. It’s taken ten years to clean out his office, and it still isn’t empty, still belongs to him.

            The office is a separate building from the house, a modest structure with two main rooms and a few hidden closets. With its sliding glass door and many windows it is as much a part of the yard as the oak tree, but it never felt like home the way the rest of her property did. I slid across the floor tiles in my grandfather’s computer chair, I even snuck Cinnamon and Rudy in sometimes, but being there never felt the way it did to lay in the grass of the open field. Perhaps it was because my grandfather didn’t feel like home the way my grandmother did. She was unapologetically selfless, and it inspired a level of safety.

            On a sunny afternoon the summer before seventh grade, she and I were sitting at the discolored picnic table, snapping fresh green beans. We were quiet, the breeze and the sounds of Cinnamon and Rudy louder than any conversation. I was thinking about the way the leaves of the oak tree rustled in the breeze, having difficulty finding a way to understand why the image was so transfixing. I was twelve, I was moody, and my grandmother’s house was still special, but it was different, and I didn’t know exactly why. It wasn’t the first time we had snapped green beans together, but it was the first time my fingers were beginning to get sore, the first time I was irritated she couldn’t just snap the green beans herself.

            My grandmother was different too. Deep in thought, I assume now that she was thinking about my dad, my uncle, my older cousin Josh or my younger cousin Carolanne. This was before I became the only one of the three of us to make it through high school, before it was evident that the stressors of being a teenager would start replacing Carolanne’s straight A’s, would pressure Josh into troublemaking. It was before, but not long before. The distance loomed with potential for success or for failure, and my grandmother fretted, forever worried about everyone else.

            It wasn’t long after seventh grade began that I started preferring my own house, my tall wooden fence and square of backyard, more sidewalk than grass. Havre de Grace is a beautiful little town, but it is right next to Aberdeen and Edgewood, the parts of my county with the highest population of poverty. Trailer parks, teen pregnancies, adolescent boys involved in gangs and shootings, these things were all so close to my grandmother’s sweet Havre de Grace. The proximity of the lower class made the difference in the towns look smaller and smaller as I continued through my Catholic private middle school, full of rich kids who went on beautiful, exotic vacations during their summers. They didn’t boast about snapping green beans with their grandmother, didn’t label watching two dogs run on an acre or two of land as a certain type of magic. They just didn’t, and so, without really noticing, no longer did I. 

            The home in my grandmother’s selflessness was no match for my selfish need to change, to grow into someone else. It became easier to stay home, easier to take Cinnamon on short walks to appease him, easier to do my homework when my mother with a master’s degree was there to help me instead of my immigrant grandmother. It became easier to avoid the oak tree, and the turtle pool, and while I let my own life develop, I found myself having difficulty remembering to consider my grandmother, alone in the quiet whitewashed house, the one with the yard seemingly too big for its weak chain-link fence.

            Only now, when everything seems so impossibly different, do I realize with a nostalgic eye that what I wanted never really changed at all. I had thought it did, had been always so focused on the distant world of my future that I forgot myself in the present. Today I can say with surety that I’d give anything for another carefree day at my grandmother’s, with the contentment that comes from watching dogs run free in a field, and snapping green beans with gentle fingers.

And what I wouldn’t give to see if the water really would reach my ankles if I stepped in the turtle pool and it was full. But today I’m almost a decade older than I was on those best days. Besides, I think my grandmother got rid of the pool anyway.

Bibliography

"City Profile." Havre De Grace. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Jan. 2015.

"Visting Havre De Grace, MD." BayDreamingcom. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Jan. 2015.