{good.byes}

Daily Mantra:

“Bring the past only if you are going to build from it.”

{doménico. cieri.estrada}

She leaned over the olive green washer in her flowing house dress, and we watched together as the machine came to its usual grinding halt. The noise was annoying at the time, but now just thinking of it brings me a warm comfort. She dabbed her cigarette in the ashtray on the dryer and set it down after one last seemingly heavenly puff. She always said her occasional smoke was ‘our little secret’, and it has been for these 24 years. I giggle…liking our secret. She transfers the perfectly white bedding from the washer and over to the dryer. Bleach wafted from the clean sheets, and when the transfer was done, the smell always seemed to saturate the air. She washed them every day. “That is why they are so white, sweetie,” she would say proudly as she took my hand and we headed out into the Summer kitchen to start the day’s baking. I would curl up in one of the over sized bottom cupboards with a Golden Book and look at the pictures as she would shuffle about from the kitchen to the pantry getting the flour (in the big, clunky tin), the lard, and the salt. I didn’t have to watch to know each move she made, right down from the rise and fall of her arm as she was carefully stirring, and then finally to the forceful cutting of the dough to make those perfect circles. After she was done we would sit at the 1950′s metal and Formica table and watch the timer as the clicks echoed on each second. To this day, I am not sure why she always had to use that silly blue timer…she must have made the biscuits a thousand times. I never asked.

When my grandmother passed away 10 years ago, she left me with more than material possessions. She left me a simple, happy past. But, of the material objects were the blue timer (blue was my grandmother’s favorite color, maybe that is why she always used it), and a framed print of Christina’s World. If ever I am lonely or in need of grandmotherly advice, I look up at Christina, and she takes me back home to the summer kitchen, where things were elegantly uncomplicated, and somehow she always gets me through.

These are our final two days in our apartment on Franklin Street. Its made me more than nostalgic…running into old family photos, letters, birth hospital bracelets, and dust bunny memories that must be just waiting to seep out when the time is right.