Generational Strands

Sitting around her wood kitchen table, its surface ridged like the jagged hilltops that enfolded the county, and well-worn with three generations of hands, my grandmother drenched buttermilk pancakes with blueberry syrup and slid the plate down the slick surface until it bumped into my open hands.

This was our Saturday morning tradition, and before the red-breasted robin on her bird-themed clock chirped seven, we’d be clearing the dishes and settling in on her wide back deck to read until noon.

I started with picture books as a girl, but as I grew older, she always had a selection of chapter books waiting for me. The Wizard of Oz. Gone With the Wind. Cold Sassy Tree. Rifles for Watie. Little House on the Prairie. I like to imagine these were the same kinds of books she enjoyed. We haven’t spent the morning reading together in ten years, and for the life of me, I can hardly remember a single particular book she enjoyed. So I like to imagine that we are the same.

Over buttermilk pancakes at the warm wooden table, my grandmother told me stories. Once, when she was very little, she stood in a valley and watched a twister unleash its fury on a ridge in the distance. It killed a family of five that day in 1933, but I don’t know their names. My grandmother was fearless, and now you know.

My other grandmother’s grandmother was an herbalist. Her name was Talitha, and her husband died from eating a poisoned peach. When my grandmother was my age, she spent the weekends with her grandmother, too, and she told me how she’d brush out Talitha’s long, white hair. She kept it braided in public for all her days, so my grandmother felt it was a special privilege to unbraid it on the weekends and brush it until it was silky.

I was jealous. My own granny’s hair was close-cropped, and curly, and the only times I remember touching it is when I grew taller than her and could lay my cheek against her forehead and the wispy curls that she forgot how to pin back on her own. But this is supposed to be a story about me.

I have no sisters and my only girl cousin is nearly twenty years older than me, so I grew up like a boy. I climbed trees and hit baseballs and ran faster than any of them. The bottoms of my feet were like moccasin leather because from April to September, my shoes laid abandoned, haphazardly piled in the back of my closet collecting spiders and dust. My father tried to teach me to make slingshots and hit squirrels, but I could never let myself take a life. I guess in some regards, I was still all-girl.

The summer before I started school, the kid from across-the-street tried to kiss me on my mouth. When I ran home to tell my mother, she said that boys would be chasing me all my life. My grandmother, who had come over for a pot of coffee, told me to kick him in the knee.

When my mother came to see what was taking so long in the bathroom later that night, she found that I had cut all my hair off in the sink. She spanked me good because neither of us understood at the time that I had shorn off the only thing that marked me a female, a female who could be chased.

I used to be tender-headed, and well into middle school, the only way my mother could get a brush to touch my curly head was to do it herself. She dragged brush bristles across my scalp and through knots that had festered for weeks, what with me being more concerned with playing in the dirt than brushing my hair. She swore she would straighten my hair out. When she braided it down my back, freshly detangled but running late for school, she was gentle, despite knowing it would be another morning of signing me in tardy. She would send me off with a hug and a kiss, and when I exited the school building in the afternoon, I could count on hers being the first car in line to pick me up.

As I grow older, I realize how like my mother I am. My dad says that we're cut from the same cloth, and he’s right. We’re stubborn and back in my tumultuous teenage years, we could go days without speaking. Or hours of overspeaking, knowing exactly the words that would slice the deepest as we tried our best to sever the other one’s hold on ourselves, always coming back angrily for more.

I am home from college, visiting my grandmother’s place. It smells like antiseptic and hospital. I have two new tattoos and red hair, and I have been crying, because my mother is furious with these modifications. I gave her some mess about finding myself. It’s been a bad semester, and I drink too much, but she doesn't know that, not yet.

My grandmother sits in her favorite yellow chair, the only piece of furniture we moved out of her house and into the nursing home. I sit at her feet and open a book that I imagine she would enjoy. I read from Cold Mountain while she stares out the window.

“It’s pretty.”

She is patting my hair, auburn red. I lean back against her chair and continue reading while she hums, and braids, and unbraids, and hums. It’s an old song that we both remember.

When my grandmother passed in January, I sat down in a beauty shop chair and told them I wanted a close crop. I sometimes did this before funerals, and sometimes not, but now I felt it was only fitting. When the chatty beautician sprayed water on my head and took out her silver scissors, I couldn’t let her go on.

The last of the auburn color was fading out, and I knew that if I could just keep these strands, so gently braided, my grandmother’s touch could stay with me for a while.

At the funeral, I was determined to eulogize my grandmother because I owed it to her to send her off with literary beauty. As I stood in front of a crowd of hundreds, I felt frozen, unable to open my mouth lest I release loud, wracking sobs instead of the beautiful words I had prepared.

Fighting to keep my vision from tunneling in on itself as I held my breath and my tears, I looked into the audience and found my mother in the front row. Dressed all in black, teary-eyed and broken-hearted, she managed a smile and a nod as we made eye contact. It's ok, her eyes said. I'm here. I took a deep breath and began anew.