Grandma's Notebooks

When Olivia was ten, she went to visit her grandmother by herself. Her parents took her to the station and Olivia boarded the train alone, bags filled with games and snacks and books, over-prepared for the six-hour trip. She had enough activities to last her at least a week, but she spent most of the time looking out the window as the train sped through the countryside towards the small, rural town where her grandmother lived. Parts of the forests the train passed through were still sprinkled in snow, but there were hints of spring in the buds that grew on the trees and the groupings of crocuses that spotted the ground, which were just a passing blur of purple to Olivia. With a stack of discs for her Walkman, filled with songs to daydream to, she pictured herself with Grandma already — one whole week, just the two of them.

When the conductor walked through her car shouting “Christ Church Falls, 10 minutes!” Olivia’s heart picked up, and she quickly gathered her things, ready to jump off as soon as the train stopped. The train approached town and Olivia could see the platform in the distance, and then she saw her grandmother, smiling even though she couldn’t see Olivia yet, standing tall in her big red coat, her hair even whiter than usual in the afternoon sun.

Jumping off the train, Olivia ran to her grandmother, and Grandma knelt down and hugged her. Olivia inhaled the scent of her lavender soap, relished in the softness of her arms.

“Oh, Olivia,” her grandmother whispered gleefully. “I can’t believe I get a whole week of you, all to myself!” Olivia thought she was the luckiest person in the world to have a grandmother like hers.

And they had a wonderful week: days spent going on long walks, her grandmother telling Olivia stories of the war, of her adventures traveling abroad, of moving to Christ Church Falls in the 1950s and how it had changed over the years. In the evenings, they would make dinner together. Olivia would be tasked with chopping vegetables while her grandmother tended to the rest, darting around the kitchen, stirring the pasta on the stove with one hand while checking the meat in the oven and whisking a Bechamel sauce with the other. They would listen to music while they cooked — Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby. When Grandma couldn’t remember the words, she would scat to the tune, and Olivia would laugh until she snorted and tears rolled down her cheeks.

On Olivia’s last day, they were quieter than usual, more subdued. On their walk, they passed the bookstore.

“Let’s go in,” Olivia said, knowing Grandma loved books, wanting nothing more than to cheer her up.

When they arrived at the display with all the notebooks, it was Olivia’s idea to buy one. “It will be like writing notes in school, Grandma.”

And so it was decided. When Olivia left, Grandma would write a letter in the notebook, and then mail it to Olivia. Then Olivia would write, and mail the notebook back. And so it would go, until the notebook was filled and they had to start another one. That way, they’d have a history of their correspondence, an archive of memories to hold on to forever.

They were both cheered by this symbol, this link that would connect them in spite of the distance, and when Olivia boarded the train the next day to go back into the city, Grandma went about writing in the notebook almost immediately. The first time Olivia received the little black notebook in the mail, she cried with longing for her grandmother, letting her tears blur the ink, cherishing every word written on the paper.

The notebook tradition went on until Olivia was sixteen. Over the years, the writing became less frequent on Olivia’s side. She still treasured the times when she saw her grandmother, of course, and she maintained there was nothing more comforting than leaning her head into Grandma’s soft shoulder to inhale the reliable smell of her lavender soap. But as Olivia got older, she got busier — with friends, school, graduation, jobs. They spoke less frequently on the phone, and the written correspondence eventually died altogether.

When Olivia was 21, she moved to Paris to work for a family as an au-pair. Inspired by her grandmother’s stories of travelling abroad, Olivia had a hunger to see the world. At her mother’s suggestion, she began sending postcards to her grandmother, who was slower and lonelier than she once was. Olivia never heard back, learning later that her grandmother didn’t have the ability to write anymore. Besides, she kept misplacing Olivia’s mailing address. Sometimes, her mother said, Grandma forgot that Olivia was in Paris at all.

Two years later, when Olivia was still in Paris, her grandmother died. Olivia couldn’t make it to Christ Church Falls in time for the funeral, and she cried for her grandmother from her small attic suite that overlooked the beige and grey Parisian rooftops. This felt wrong and detached, and Olivia mourned her lack of mourning as much as she did the loss of her grandmother.

But Olivia’s life in Paris went on, keeping her busy and distracted. She had nothing in Paris to remind her of her grandmother, so she didn’t really think of her at all. There were times when a song or a smell would bring her back to Christ Church Falls in an instant, but those times were rare and brief. Olivia would cry, but then she would go for drinks with her friends on a Parisian terrace and the nostalgia and melancholy would leave as quickly as it had come. When she found out her grandmother had left her $20,000 in her will a few months later, Olivia was grateful, but she quickly invested it and didn’t give it much thought.

When Olivia returned home a few years later, her mother gave her a box that she’d found when clearing Grandma’s house. A piece of masking tape on the top of the box read “Olivia,” and when she opened it, she found at least a dozen black notebooks, neatly stacked against one another, some more faded than others, some bulging and others thinner.

Olivia sat on the floor of her childhood bedroom for hours, leafing through the notebooks as though they were precious artefacts found in an archaeological dig, inhaling the comforting smell of old paper. The notebooks brought back memories not only of her relationship with her grandmother, but of her life as a child and a teenager. They were relics of two lives lived.

Olivia cried when she found their first notebook. Her heart hurt at the longing in her grandmother’s first letter to her, expressing how much she missed her. “Like a Robin who’s missing its eggs,” she’d written.

Olivia also found a notebook she’d never seen before. It was newer and shinier, and the receipt was still stuck inside. Opening it, she found the postcards she’d sent over the years. Her grandmother had dutifully taped them to the pages of the notebook, backwards, so the words in the postcards were legible. Olivia was ashamed for what she’d written, sometimes just a sentence or two. Her words were superficial, meaningless. When she reached the end of the postcards, she found her grandmother’s writing. It was shaky and hard-to-read, and her prose wasn’t nearly as full as it once was, but it was a letter from Grandma all the same, recounting her day in Christ Church Falls, admiring the crystal clear blue of the lake she could see from her window.

As Olivia aged, she continued to travel the world, eventually settling down on the other side of the country from her parents. Her parents were older now, and her mother called her frequently, trying to mask the sadness and longing Olivia could so clearly hear in her voice. Her mother had always hoped Olivia would return to her hometown after Europe, but Olivia had children of her own, she was settled.

The investment Olivia had made in her twenties grew over decades, and she and her partner eventually bought a small piece of land on the lake at Christ Church Falls, where they built a cottage. Christ Church Falls had become the central meeting point for the family to come together and reconnect.

When Olivia’s eldest daughter was old enough, she showed her the notebooks. Her daughter was riveted by them, and kept them in her room. She would carefully leaf through them at night, treasuring the drawings and the postcards especially, and on more than one occasion, Olivia found her daughter asleep with the notebooks surrounding her on her bed.

It was her daughter’s idea to start writing to Olivia’s mother, and while her mother never embraced writing the way Olivia’s grandmother had, she played along, and appreciated the connection and love that the notebooks fostered.

The years passed and Olivia’s daughter had kids of her own. Olivia imagines that one day, when she is a grandmother herself, she will keep the tradition going with a future grandchild. She wants nothing more than to have a pen pal in her grandchildren, just as she had once with her own grandmother.

The tradition lives on through generations, and Olivia’s family has enough notebooks to fill a full bookshelf. They are at the cottage now, and in the summers, Olivia sits down in her favourite chair and pulls out that first notebook she exchanged with her grandmother those many years ago. In an instant, she is transformed into a restless 10-year-old once more, nose pressed against the glass, feeling her heart skip as her grandmother comes into sight, who stands tall and smiling on the platform in her big red coat.

They are just notebooks, but the yellow pages and faded writing bring a comfort and sense of belonging to Olivia that she has a hard time finding anywhere else. She is home.