Preserving a Memory
Candy Puterbaugh
50plus Magazine
Glass jars of golden peaches gleaming like sunshine on my kitchen shelf always bring Grandma back to me. She was going to teach me how to can one year but was taken before peach season that year. I think of her every canning season.
I can hear the quick-stepped clicking of her thick heels on concrete that last early spring day as we walked arm in arm down her smalltown sidewalk to the salon to perm her
gray gossamer hair. At 89 she had become a pale, frail, wisp of a woman, like an autumn leaf easily whisked away by the wind.
Leaving the salon, she was jostled by a group of laughing young people who paid no heed to the aging lady with pencil-thin legs poking out of her well-worn, mid-calf cotton dress belted high on her waist. A cobweb of curls failed to cover her pale scalp, perched nobly atop a thin neck that held her head high with pride. It would be the last day Grandma still knew me.
Months before, during mid-winter in her simple, creaky linoleum-floored kitchen, admiring the jars of peaches like crescent moons on her pantry shelves, I had asked if she would teach me to can come summer.
“That’s six months away; I hope I’m six feet under by then,” she replied curtly with a nervous laugh, halting conversation as I stood speechless, reeling with the realization that she meant it.
She’d had a sharp tongue as long as I could remember; giving compliments wasn’t her way. I tried to make the hour-long drive often to visit, toddler in tow. I wasn’t sure what she thought of me — she never said. I figured something in her life had put a lock on her feelings. But on that sunny day walking to the salon, arms linked, she gave me a slight smile of thanks, a flash of emotion from behind her curtain of reserve.
She seemed more at ease with men, her eyes brightening at their masculine banter, bringing laughter that sounded as if she was sucking in quick bursts of air — like laughing backwards.
Years later, that laughter ebbed after Grandpa died of a heart attack while repairing the roof of his tire shop. She was left alone in the tiny white house on the big corner lot. Family and friends offered lodging until she got back on her feet. But she was on her feet in a short time, hoeing and canning and washing and cooking and walking the two blocks to the grocery store.
She lived in that house without Grandpa for 22 years, her tiny steps taking her to church on Sundays, blue pillbox hat propped on her head, square black purse hung on her arm. But her world grew smaller, the walking stopped, and she stayed home more.
It was a May morning that I drove with my toddler to have lunch with her that I knew something was wrong. She usually greeted me at the front door, but it was locked. We walked around back and called to her, then slowly entered her kitchen. Cereal scattered everywhere crunched under my feet. Grandma sat motionless and disheveled on her kitchen chair with a vacant gaze, mumbling a string of senseless words. I looked at her calendar taped crookedly to a wall. An X marked our lunch together that day.
My father came right away, his medical mind telling him his mother had suffered a stroke.
Grandma was soon moved to a care home nearby. When I next saw her, she was sitting in the living room, dressed in her usual cotton dress and black sensible shoes. She focused on me silently with a glassy, distant gaze.
My final visit was a farewell to the warm form under blankets in bed, her proud face to the wall, turning her back on life.
I canned peaches myself that summer, and have every summer since. Each click of a canning jar lid taking hold carries me back to the quick click-click of Grandma’s heels on pavement that spring day as she turned to give me a rare smile.
I understand her more now that I am Nana to three little ones. And even though she never did teach me to can, she passed on much more about life as she walked through her golden years with head held high.