I came back to my birthplace to live seven months ago, but the last week has been an adventure in finding out from where I really came.
I've made a half dozen runs down the lakeshore highways to my cottage, hauling, cleaning, sorting and cleaning some more during the hottest and muggiest conditions folks have seen in some time.
At the cottage, it's just been me and the walls my grandfather built the year before I was born. Thanks to his workmanship, the cottage is holding up much better than I.
I haven't hooked up the water softener yet to tame the fragrant and colorful well water, so I carried a two-day need for a shower back to the city with me where I stopped at my favortie aunt and then my cousin's house.
Aunt Judy had saved " a little" (read that a heaping plate) of shrimp salad for my visit and brought out Grandma's "papers--" Grandma's pictures of her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren (numbering five, 17 and 17 again at the time of her death), her father's declaration of citizenship and renunciation of William II, my father's promotion to Air Force sergeant during the Korean War, poems and letters.
On three pages of a yellow legal pad (which Grandma apparently believe made it a legal document) she dictated her very specific last wishes. The document was amazing in it's thoroughness, complexity and generosity. She provided for every one of her children, grandchildren and great greandchildren without favor. Unmarried grandchildren got more money as the gift for their future wedding. The cash was to be distributed as savings bonds. It gave costs and simple instructions for her funeral with specific language requiring that she would pay for it herself and that it would be nice, but not fancy... like her husband's 15 years earlier.
We could all have learned something about saving from Grandma. She did not work outside the home in my lifetime. They never owned an automobile and my grandfather was a meat packing plant mechanic. There was nearly $30,000 to distribute in her accounts.
This small window into the strength and clarity of her priorities, even to her last days, caused me to both laugh and cry.
At the next stop, my cousin Bernie's, they were cleaning the garage in the kind of chaos I'd been dealing with at the cottage. I was there to coordinate apartment move details for today and was telling them that I was going to eventually decorate the cottage in historical family photos.
Bernie exchanged a glance with his wife and said "let's give it to her now." He explained they had been saving something for my move to permanent quarters here. A homecoming gift.
Karen returned with a large, gorgeous sepia wedding portrait of a stunning couple. He in tails, gloves and spats. She a flapper beauty with a smooth, straight ankle-length dress with a long train. In all the finery, their dark eyes dominated the canvas. Their clothing was early 1920s. Their attractiveness was timeless.
I held it for an awkward moment not sure who these people were. There was no mistaking the eyes, but my grandparents were grey-headed adults and the children of immigrants, how could they have been so stunning, so confident, so very fine?
I lay in bed for a long time last night thinking first of how sore my muscles were from all the recent activity... and how my grandparents worked like that every day of their lives.
Bernie and his son, Eddie, will be here in a few minutes to help me move the "big furniture" over to the new apartment. I have to believe Grandma is somehow observing and loving seeing her grandchildren working together in this way. Ed, as big and handsome as his father was at 16, wasn't even born yet when she died. But she'll be here. As will her husband.
Some people take pride in counting numerous generations and titles in their family tree. I simply know I come from good stock.
My first daughter was an infant when Grandma died. Her middle name is my grandmother's. She separated herself from our entire family more than a year ago, we see her only sporadically and now that her college email address has expired, have no way to reach her.
But she is of them. It may only be a fraction of her genetic makeup, but it's a strong one. And for the first time since she left us, I know she'll be back.

Copyright 2005 Judi Griggs