In a Sentimental Mood

In the course of excavating my life, I've unearthed some long-buried artifacts from my past. For the most part, I've been able to turn them over delicately in my mind, smile or wince, depending on the nature of the memory, and then put them back into whatever dark and dusty corner of my mind from which they emerged. Lately, however, I've been spending a great deal of time with a particular set of memories. I was very close to my great-grandmother. I was the first born in my generation (on both sides of my family), so I held a special place among my siblings and cousins. It was a mantle that didn't particularly suit me. I don't care much for the expectations of others. It makes me unhappy and tense for other people to super-impose their own standards onto my particular "abilities". My nan - that's what I called her - seemed to understand that about me, and somehow always knew how to deal with me. All of the memories I have of my time with her are marked by a profound sense of peace. I miss her terribly.


Ellizabeth "Bessie" Gossett was born on October 15, 1897 in London. She came to America very early in her life. She met my great-grandfather Frank in her early teens, and they were married in 1912. Family lore has it that they were on their way to the little country church in a horse drawn carriage, with the preacher in another carriage ahead of them. The bridge to the church was out, apparently, but rather than postpone the ceremony (or take it as an omen of discouragement), they had the preacher stand in his carriage and shout the vows to them. They were married standing in their own carriage. They managed to have a drive-thru wedding while Las Vegas was still just a bowl of sand. My great-grandfather bought a substantial parcel of land in Collierville, Tennessee, a rural Eden on the outskirts of Memphis, and built every structure that stood on it. The main house was a rambling, one story farmhouse with a big kitchen, a sturdy front porch, and an almost comically sloping floor. They added bedrooms as they added children - my grandfather Lonnie, his brothers Wallace and Herbert, and my great-aunts Lavelle and Opal. Frank died in 1957 (ten years before I entered the picture), when the tractor he was driving overturned, rolling on top of him. Nan was the one who found him. Years of living on a farm had toughened her. I'm sure she was devastated by the loss, but I never heard her speak of it. She poured herself into her family and moved on. The farm fell into disrepair. I remember that there was still a fair amount of livestock in the form of pigs, horses, a couple of goats and a coop full of persnickety chickens, but the barn, which must have been impressive in its day, was strictly forbidden as it had become a battleground for snakes. rats and owls. Keeping us out of the barn was, strangely, not a problem.

So much of my childhood was coloured with my experiences on that land, and by Nan herself. The memories go to the bone, engaging every sense. I remember the cold porcelain and never hot enough water of the old claw-foot bathtub. Nan's feather bed, to which I was quarantined after being felled by a stubborn midsummer cold, holds a place of particular reverence. It was the site of what stands to this day as the best sleep of my life. As an adult, plagued by insomnia, I've spent many a night pining for the somnolent charms of that old feather bed. I remember the old side porch, with its dark, worn wood and old tin roof. One of my fondest memories of that porch was when I was about 10 years old. It was early summer, before the heat really started to feel like a schoolyard bully, making us shrink from even the thought of going outside to play. The porch was a small, screened in structure that ran alongside the sitting room. It looked out on the side yard, and beyond that, the cornfield. There was just enough room for two rocking chairs, tucked into an oasis of potted plants. It was storming that day, and Nan and I sat rocking slowly, each with a bowl of fresh snap beans in our lap, readying them for that evening's meal. We would break off the ends of the beans and drop the finished ones into a big glass bowl on the floor between us. Snap, snap, plink. Snap, snap, plink. We didn't really talk--the din of the rain on the tin roof would have made that difficult, anyway. It sounded like the old song..."Every time it rains, it rains Pennies from Heaven." There we sat, shrouded in the hypnotic, metallic thrumming and clean smell of the downpour, the perfume of the plants and flowers (this memory always smells like the colour green to me), and the rhythm and sense of purpose of the task at hand. Whenever I am wearied by modern life, I retreat headlong into that memory as if bursting through the doors of a church and calling "Santcuary!". It is one of the very few instances in my life that secured me to the "now". My mind wasn't ribboning out behind me toward the past, nor was it rocketing ahead to the future. It was just there, in that moment, and I was perfect and happy.

This was a point in my childhood when I still dreamed of a "normal" future. I usually slept in the front room of the house that used to belong to my Aunt Opal. It was a tiny little jewel-box of a room, with a low, mahogany bed set. The wallpaper was covered in vines and roses that are undoubtedly less faded in my memory than they were in reality. By then, the room was more a gallery than a bedroom. It housed an impressive collection of family photos, some being a century old and a beautiful, rich sepia tone. There were hand tinted portraits of my great-great-grandparents, with their stoic faces. Pictures of my grandfather and my great uncles in their uniforms, going off to fight in World War II, so handsome and full of purpose and pride. My great aunts, so young and lovely it made my heart swell. Pictures of my father and his sisters as children, surrounded by cousins and blinking against the sun. My whole beloved family. I loved that room. It managed to smell lived in without a trace of stagnance or mustiness. It was just comfortable and peaceful. I always imagined that some day I would marry and bring my husband there, and introduce him to the generations of faces that had watched over me while I slept, dreaming of the very idea of him. It would have been a lovely circle to complete.

Another anecdote that comes to mind, speaking of bedrooms, pertains to the room across the hall from mine. It was much larger, and I believe it served as the boys' room when my grandfather was growing up. My commandeering the smaller room for myself was something of a coup, considering that the larger room was acknowledged by nearly everyone in the house as being legitemately haunted. I kid you not. Even at the point when our family tree was devoid of infants, a baby could be heard crying in that room. My second cousin Richard took great pleasure in relaying the story of Nan's one and only miscarriage, and her subsequent refusal to allow the fetus to be buried. "What happened to it?" we asked with an even mixture of skepticism and wide-eyed fear. "No one really knows," he replied eerily. We avoided that room with the same fervour that marked our avoidance of the barn. The year that my Grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, we took the opportunity to have a corresponding family reunion. Family came to Memphis from all over the country, landing at the various family residences in the area. We stayed at Nan's. In the course of figuring out the sleeping arrangements, a number of us volunteered to sleep in the "Haunted Room" as it had been officially dubbed. I was 20 then, and well beyond the paranoia of childhood ghost stories. Richard was there. Some of my siblings and other cousins were among the volunteers. The room was a patchwork of pallets and sleeping bags. It took some time to get everyone settled in and quieted down, but we managed to get through the night without incident. The next morning, we were restoring the room to its pre-slumber party state. None of us had spent any more time there than was warranted by the occasional childhood dare (think Boo Radley's porch in "To Kill a Mockingbird"), so naturally, we were curious, which led to a fairly thorough exploration of the room. We did everything short of drawing straws to determine the unlucky soul who would be charged with opening the closet door. My brother Sean won(?) the honour. No goblins or ghosts there, just old coats, some folding chairs and a stack of old blankets. There wasn't even an ominous door to the attic to fuel the imagination. Very anticlimactic. It was then that I noticed an old curio cabinet tucked into an alcove in the corner of the room. It housed a collection of mementos that apparently belonged to my Nan. There was an old picture frame, shrouded in a thin film of dust. A swipe of the thumb across the glass revealed a hazy black-and-white photo of my great-grandfather lying in his coffin. Okay, chill number one. There was an assortment of dried flowers and other memorabilia, the specific significance of which was lost to us. I noticed a lovely, hexagonal, amber coloured glass jar with an ornate, cut glass stopper. It was very pretty, and obviously very old. I picked it up, holding it gingerly and turning toward the window. When the light hit it, I noticed that the glass itself wasn't amber, but was instead coated on the inside with a reddish brown film. I held the jar up to the window, and as it tilted slightly, something shifted inside it and came to rest against one of it facets. Everyone around me leaned in to examine it. It looked like an old doll of some sort. The film inside the jar was practically transparent in the center of each facet. I adjusted the jar to center the doll and get a better look. Who would put a doll in a jar?, I thought. I could make out the over sized head, the tiny body, and two tiny arms, drawn up and together. Realisation crept into each of our brains at almost exactly the same moment. My god, this is a human fetus. THE fetus. Nan's miscarriage. Holy sh--everyone started screaming and running for the bedroom door. Everyone but me, that is. Though I was horrified at the truth of our discovery, and was most definitely startled by the outburst, to my credit, I held on to the jar. My mind reeled as I considered the truth behind all of the ghost stories from my childhood. A truth that not even the tellers of those stories had been aware. Then I started to cry. Not out of fear, but out of genuine, mournful sadness. This was not just evidence of family lore that I held in my hands, it was part of my family tree. A tiny little branch that never got the chance to bloom. I took a ragged breath, patted the jar, and placed it back in the cabinet, just as gingerly as I had taken it out. The curio took on a very different air. There in that spot were remembrances of all the things my Nan had lost. Here they were close by, and safe in a way that she hadn't been able to keep them in the past. I felt the horrible weight of trespasser's guilt. I closed the door of the cabinet and left the room. Everyone else stood in the foyer, some still racked with the "heebie-jeebies". I was too spent to find the humour in that. It was obvious that I had been crying. One of my cousins made as though to comfort me, but I deflected his arm. I patently forbade everyone from relaying the incident to anyone else in the family, and threatened them with bodily harm if word of it ever got back to Nan. As far as I know, no one ever betrayed that.

That trip was significant for a number of reasons. It was, after all, my grandparents Golden anniversary. It was also the only official family reunion on my father's side of the family. Many of the relatives I met that weekend I had never seen before, and haven't seen since. It was also the last time I ever saw Nan. Leaving that old house to return home was always a whirlwind of activity. Packing, loading the cars, the obligatory care packages of leftovers that materialised out of nowhere at the last minute, the final sweep of the house to ensure that nothing (or no one) had been left behind. As the family made their good-bye's, I turned to look at Nan, standing atop the little slope that led down to the driveway. She was almost 90 then. She seemed so small and frail, but rallied against it with chin up and hands on hips. I walked slowly up to her. The slope of the yard made us nearly the same height. I remember the smile on her face and the wisps of hair that had escaped their loose bun blowing around her lovely, crepe face. Standing in that yard, surrounded by our family, we put our foreheads together, placed out hands on one another's faces, and shared a silent moment. It was a gesture we shared from my childhood. Everything I had learned about her that fateful weekend had only deepened the bond I had with her. The family had fallen silent during our little display. My eyes had welled up by that point. Nan patted my cheek, whispering "Be good, little one." I nodded, told her I loved her, and kissed her good-bye. We both knew that we wouldn't see each other again. The last time I saw her, she was standing in front of the old house waving good-bye to the caravan of cars and RV's that spirited her family back to their lives. I was off to university that Fall, and then to California after that. Life took hold, and I never made it back to Collierville, as we both knew I wouldn't.

She always said that she wanted to live to be 100. I got the phone call from my brother Sean on January 3, 1998. One hundred years, two months and nineteen days after my Nan came into this world, she left it quietly and calmly, passing in her sleep. I never got over the fact that they buried her without me. It was all so fast. I still reel a little when I think of it. The family sold the old house and what remained of the land to the vulturous developers that had hounded Nan for the last decade of her life. It was the beginning of the estrangement I have from my family. The house was razed. "New" homes were erected in its place. That beloved old house has been relegated to memory and imagination, taking its place alongside my beloved Oz, Narnia, and the Shire of Middle Earth - all of the places I spent the happy days of my childhood. Nan is with me, too. Whenever I'm tired or angry, I hear her voice come out of my mouth in the slight lilt of my English ancestry. The words "Be good, little one" are always in my ear. Those dark and dusty corners of my mind hold mementos of all the things I've lost over the course of my life, even the shriveled remains of my former self. It's nice to know that I come by that tendency honestly.