November 10, 2007

A Return Home

I have been at a little convening of four artistic directors of companies who engage in community arts-making, in Evanston for the last few days. We are staying a block off Lake Michigan, and it certainly is fall in the midwest by now. And chilly, too. Like my growing up days - although I must admit I don't remember fall - or life!- as colorful as it seems here. 

Tomorrow I will return to my hometown to pick up the last of things that were in my mother's house when she died two years ago. The house was sold almost immediately, so these items have been in my Aunt Marie's garage all this while.

For the life of me, I can't remember what it is specifically in those boxes. The big stuff includes two Appalachian stick furniture chairs that my grandmother had bought off the back of the truck of some man as he sold his home-made chairs in the "affluent" Midwest. They are beautiful. I can see my grandmother sitting in one of them on our front porch watching the traffic turn onto the main street of our downtown. At the time the population was most likely under 400 people - the first traffic light was still twenty years into the future. We had rotary phones. TV's were still black and white. Nuns who still wore black and white robes with starched peaked headgear (habits, I think they were called) can be seen with big gardening gloves on, snipping at the roses in their garden, which butts up against our yard. This is the view off the backporch.

I suppose that in the boxes are family photos - and when I pull out each of them, I will nod my head to agree with myself that ah, yes, I remember the existence of it - the picture, the image, the memory, the real people depicted in it, the landscape. And I will mumble something like, I haven't thought about him/her/it/them for years. And then instead of nodding yes, I will shake my head no. Then I will pull another picture out and start with the nod all over again.

My Aunt Marie, along with my adult cousins and mayb some of their kids will come to a dinner my aunt has prepared, and I will nod yes, shake no several times as each incremental taste of the meal will remind me of previous family meals, holidays. 

In Gumdrops, we have begun to make a section about Elver's family's favorite dish - a simple dish of seasoned meat, that is cured in beer and within the wrapping of leaves of the plaintain. This all took place in Colombia, in the country where they had no electricity.

The meal: the lighting, the people, the relationships, the mood. Funny, or not  - most likely a mix of funny, sad, pedestrian. We all have memories of eating together- - these might be the stories most common to all families.

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