January. These long winter nights fill me with reflection. Images from the past. They linger, coursing through my mind. Keeping me awake all these years later. Countless hours staring into the dark, my sleeping wife curled against me in the bed of our pleasant home. Teenagers asleep upstairs. In a few short years, they'll be on their own.
If you are middle-aged, like me, much of your past is inconsequential, forgotten. Just a decades-long string of repetitive days. But some days never leave you. Some hold secrets. Delicious recollections. Those you replay, night after night. Or maybe not. There are days you should just let slip away. Some secrets shouldn't be dredged up at all.
I can't put a label on which this is for me. I keep hitting the replay button. There's a need to understand. So I reverse engineer my past. Deconstruct those lazy summer days long ago, in search of some truth.
In bed at night, and without warning, the sounds also return from long ago. Crickets chirping in the evening fields. Cicadas vibrating in the trees. And our footsteps -- my mother's and mine -- climbing the narrow, dark stairway to the attic. My grandparents' attic. You see, it always begins with my grandparents.
* * *
Theirs was a clapboard farmhouse in the country. They had lived there since the Depression. A drafty two-story affair, large and rambling, steep-pitched metal roof, worn floorboards. The ceilings were high, the stairs creaked. The furniture and the rugs, time-worn and frayed, but comfortable. Out back, the stillness of tobacco fields and endless rows of soybeans beneath a hot summer sun. No neighbors in sight.
It was the covered, wrap-around front porch with its swing and gathering of wooden rocking chairs that my dad found the most intolerable. He had no use for rural America, sitting around on porches like that, passing the evening away. Wasted time, he would say. Too much stillness. Everything so quiet. Which is why, as often as possible, he avoided the two-hour drive to my mother's parents, and the house she grew up in.
Not me. As a young boy, I loved that farm. At least once a month, always on a Saturday morning, I found myself sitting by the passenger-side window, head leaning out to catch the wind, as my mother drove our old, two-toned '64 Chevrolet along the back roads to Gramma's house. One hand on the steering wheel, the other brushing hair out of her face. We drove with all windows down. She was thin and wore simple sun dresses on weekends, light and airy, flowing out from her waist. Usually a pale yellow or flowered pattern, the hem pulled above her knees in the car to capture any breeze. She kicked off her sandals to work the pedals barefoot. I kicked off my sneakers, took off my socks. Such endearing memories. Some of the best.
Sitting on that porch, Gramma would bring us sweet iced tea. While she and my mother talked, Granddad would give me a ride on his tractor, out to the far reaches of the farm, then back. Just for the fun of it. Folks from other farms dropped by later to sit a spell, rocking back and forth. Stories were told into the evening. And then, absolute darkness. No streetlights, of course. Everything outside turning black. Only the Milky Way above. And one feeble, lighted bulb dangling from the porch ceiling.
"Are you ready?" my mother would ask.
Each time I followed her inside, held on to the banister, step by step to the second floor. Then down the long hallway past her brothers' old, unused bedrooms. Opening a plain heavy door, we began a steep, forbidding climb in the dark, up impossibly narrow stairs, walls closing in, winding sharply to the left and to another door. The entrance to the attic. Inside was the bedroom she knew as a girl.
It was small with an awkward, A-frame ceiling, and only one window. All of it a patchwork, walls hammered together by Granddad. I was uneasy with it at first. The furniture faded and threadbare, from another time. A small bedside table and lamp. A mahogany wardrobe against the opposite wall, its finish gone to black. A full-length mirror on its door. A wooden chair beside it. All of it hand-me-downs. Images that remain vivid to this day.
Mother slept on the lumpy double bed. I had a sleeping bag on the floor. Above, a slow ceiling fan. A small gas-flame floor heater to one side. A cramped bathroom with toilet and claw-foot tub. Not much else. All of it claustrophobic, dimly lit and silent. Barely enough space to move around. The musty smell, she told me, was there even when she was my age. I'd fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.
The years rolled by, the trips added up, each time finding us back on that porch and sleeping in her old bedroom. It began to carry some appeal, if only for the quaint coziness of it. I was 27, finishing graduate school, when the change began. During one predictably hot July.
* * *
For hours, we cleaned out the cobwebs and clutter in the barn, our clothes soaked in sweat. It was one of our now twice-monthly trips to the farm. All to help my grandfather, who by then was in declining health. Exhaustion consumed us. Moving to the porch after dinner, my grandparents sat in those rockers, Gramma breaking up snap beans from a bowl in her lap. I was in the swing beside my mother, she in her usual sun dress. With the spread of darkness, the grandparents retired for the night.
Mother and I uncorked a bottle of red wine sneaked in from the car. We sipped it in juice glasses pilfered from the kitchen. Swinging slowly back and forth. The swing squeaking. Moths flitting around that solitary porch light overhead. A few fireflies blinking on and off out in the darkness. The nighttime heat only slightly less draining than the daytime sun. Somewhere in the sweet scent of green crops and rich soil, I could detect the familiar aroma of her skin. Her sweat mingled with a hint of perfume on her wrist when she lifted her glass. She was that close. After pouring maybe one too many glasses, she stood up.
"Are you ready?" she asked. We headed inside.
I don't want to mislead you. Mother was not a youngish, bosomy blonde. She bore the narrow face of a calm and serious, middle-aged high school librarian, which she was. Tall and thin, a brunette with watchful eyes and chocolate brown hair pulled up in back, off her neck. Turning gray here and there, with a few strands of silver. A straight nose, lips perpetually ready to break into a wide smile, but never quite did. It was just her look. Well-dressed at school, modest fashions, low heels. She did not think herself attractive. It's true, she wasn't a standout, but nice looking.
I thought her a proper woman. Decent, respected. Carrying an inborn sense of responsibility. A woman with an education, who had manners, chose her words carefully, and kept her past to herself. She donned reading glasses to look at menus. She was often silent. To me a sign of sophistication. I admired that. Collecting black and white photographs. That was her hobby. Scenes from the long ago sidewalks and plazas of New York, Paris, Berlin. Photos large enough to be framed and hung on the walls of our home. Most were of crowds sitting at sidewalk cafes. Tables where one could sit and watch life go by without participating. Places she knew she would never get to. She was 52.
