Tag: recollections

The Walk to Ma’s House

17 December 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Diane Funston

Walking to my great-grandmother’s house after fifth and sixth grade once a week–I remember so clearly, see it right in front of me. Out of the old brick Lincoln school number 22 off Joseph Avenue. Turning right towards downtown, you could see the huge Baptist Church way at the end of the avenue, Xerox Tower beyond that.

My memory is always winter. This was a magical journey in winter. I remember huge soft snowflakes falling, the air cold but very fresh. Catching snowflakes on my tongue, on my fluffy mittens. It was almost like a Christmas card.

Passing Bodner Bakery on my right, the scent of fresh pastries and breads wafted out the door and smelled of warmth and love. Prune rugalach, challah, black and white cookies, sliced seeded rye in the slicer.

Blanks Market was next, a sausage shop with all the German wurst we would buy on Saturday. Sausages and hams hung in the big front window. Slabs of bacon in the case, along with homemade sauerkraut and potato salad. Across the street was Schmidts Market, a butcher who also made sauerkraut, sold in cardboard containers like Chinese food comes in. Schmidts also sold fresh ground round my grandmother used to make gahochtus, raw beef with onions, egg, and seasoning served on pumpernickel bread. Delicious.

I went past the fish market where whole fish with staring eyeballs looked out from the case. On Friday the place was alive and jumping with people lined up to buy take-out fish fry. Farther along was the Bareis Shoe store with Buster Brown and his dog Tige on a hanging sign. Saddle shoes were in the window, and black patent leather shoes. On a winter day there were lacy snowflakes glittering in the display window.

Next on my walk, right at the corner of Wilkins Street where I turned left to walk to Ma’s house was a tombstone engraver with monuments in the yard and samples of engraving in the window. Beautiful rose granite and white marble you just had to run your hand over on the way by. A gorgeous black wrought iron fence kept people away from the stones.

Walking up the street I pass rows of houses mostly from the 1920s like Ma’s house. Some are multi-family, large homes referred to as Boston style with big front porches, even on the upstairs units. The single family houses are mostly small cottage style. Nothing ornate about them architecture-wise. Small backyards, many with fenced front yards with gardens. I pass lots of roses wrapped for the winter, lilac bushes, barberry shrubs and a lot of city street trees that are maples or chestnuts. A few spruce trees and juniper bushes add green and blue to the stark landscape.

At last I arrive at my great-grandmother’s house. Up three steps then four into the small front porch and inside. I smell the chicken vegetable soup simmering on the old 1930s Magic Chef stove. I hug Ma, and she kisses me on both cheeks. She is 80, white hair in a tight bun held in place with barrettes. She has glasses, wears a tiny floral print dress covered by an apron. Her feet wear black, heavy shoes that lace up.

We talk about school and I have coffee and windmill cookies with her. I’ve been drinking coffee since I was ten. It’s a very German tradition to have coffee and a sweet around three or four in the afternoon. After my snack I help her dust. The living room has dark navy blue velvet and wicker furniture. There is a humidor where my great-grandfather kept cigars. I don’t remember him; he died when I was a year old. There is wallpaper in the living and dining rooms. The woodwork is dark stained oak.

The kitchen is painted a very light pink. Gray Formica covers the lower half of the walls like wainscoting. The refrigerator is very old with a tiny freezer and a handle that pulled toward you to open up. Westinghouse, I remember. A key-wound Art Deco clock kept time in the kitchen, it’s loud pendulum swung back and forth. A big rocking chair is in the middle of the large kitchen. The cat, Topper, on the cushion, sleeping.

Before supper I shovel a little path by the back door and sprinkle some rock salt. Both Ma and the neighbor Mable have luscious perennial gardens that bloom crazy in other seasons. The other neighbor Willy has a beautiful garden and a pond with goldfish that winter over.

We eat supper, the hot soup with little oyster crackers. She does a funny thing with her dentures where they jut out of her mouth then back in again. I feel very cared for and loved by my great-grandma and my grandma. I loved going to her house every week. It gave warmth to the winter, the walk over so full of all of the senses. It was a time of innocence, where I could be a young girl who didn’t have to have all the answers.

Diane Funston was born and raised in Rochester, New York, and currently lives in Marysville, CA. Diane has worked with adults with disabilities her entire working life. Besides emerging as a writer, Diane enjoys beading, hiking, her family, and her dogs.

bunch of photo print — Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

The Old Photographs

3 June 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Joan Potter

My ex-son-in-law, who’s been out of my life for several years, just mailed me two photographs. I’m looking at one of them now. It’s an 8 x 10 print, in muted colors overlaid with a faded golden tint. Resting on a table in the foreground is an oblong Pyrex dish holding the remains of a green bean casserole, some creamy sauce still coating the inside corner. Next to it is an earthenware bowl with a spoon balanced on its edge, and a glass half full of red wine.

Across the table sit three of the dozen or so family members celebrating Thanksgiving in my daughter’s dining room. I’m on the left, wearing a red ribbed turtleneck, my grey hair cut short. I’m looking off in the direction of someone out of the picture.

Next to me is my youngest grandson, still with the chubby cheeks of a twelve-year-old. He’s smiling as he digs into his plate of food; he always loved to eat. On his other side is his teenage cousin, face partly hidden by the wine glass in the foreground, glancing with amusement at his young relative.

We always gathered for Thanksgiving dinner at the house my daughter shared with her then-husband and their two girls. It was just a few miles from where my husband and I lived in our New York City suburb. Their house had the most room, as well as a fireplace we could relax in front of after dinner.

The second photograph my ex-son-in-law enclosed was taken in the living room. In this one, my eldest granddaughter, a teenager then, is in the foreground, strumming a guitar with her lips parted in song. My husband, wearing a colorful sweater and khaki pants, is seated in a chair near her, looking thoughtful.

These pictures were taken almost twenty years ago. I don’t know why my former son-in-law decided to send them now. Perhaps he’s feeling sentimental. He and my daughter have been divorced for several years – amicably, she says. The chubby-cheeked grandson is now thirty, an engineer. His older cousin, my second daughter’s son, works on an upstate horse farm. I never hear from him.

The guitar-playing granddaughter lives in a small Midwestern city where she moved to be close to her younger sister, whose husband is studying at the university there. The younger sister is now planning to file for divorce. The older one, the guitar-playing one, is pregnant with her first child. She says she’s been having some problems with her boyfriend, the baby’s father, but they’re working things out. My husband, who was pensively listening to his granddaughter’s song, has been dead for six years.

Now that I’ve pored over these two photographs long enough, there’s no reason to keep them. They’re too big to store and the quality is poor. I already have closet shelves full of albums and boxes stuffed with hundreds of pictures of family as toddlers, teenagers, new parents, grandparents. It can be both enjoyable and painful to sift through them – my mother and father smiling in front of their California house, my four kids eating lobster rolls in Maine, and the many images of my husband, looking proud and content, with various babies resting on his lap.

Joan Potter‘s personal essays have appeared in anthologies and literary journals. Her piece, The Blur, appeared in the January, 2023 issue of The Bluebird Word. Her work has also been published in Persimmon Tree, The RavensPerch, Bright Flash Literary Review, Iron Horse Review, and others. She has published several nonfiction books.

Memories of Old Things

27 April 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Peter A. Witt

Bedroom closet is full of ghosts,
not the kind that lay siege with angst,
no, the kind that recall the warmth
of a spring day, when soon to be wife,
Sally, was the victim of my indiscreet kiss
as I wore my still favorite blue-green shirt.

An old skate brings memories of doing twirls
on the frozen pond until Mr. Smithers
chased us near teens off, afraid we’d
all plunge to our deaths, or worse yet,
having to rescue us.

Coin collection reminds me of Uncle Fred,
the dear old man, who used the tarnished gelt
as props to tell us endless stories about places
he’d visited, but really hadn’t, we listened anyway.

Under a shadow of dust is a painting,
the brush by numbers kind, done in third grade —
like the rest of my life, colors spilling
over the boundaries and mismatched.

Finally, a baseball caught on the day
Sandy Koufax pitched a no-hitter for the third time,
at least that’s what I told people, and would
pass onto my grandson without correcting the story.

Cleaned out the closet as I packed for the retirement home,
no room there for anything beyond a few faded pictures,
last year’s Christmas cards, my favorite reading chair,
a pile of books I’ve meant to read for years,
and a heavy blanket I’ll lay over my lap,
while I finish a painting with my unsteady hand.

Peter A. Witt is a Texas poet and a retired university Professor. He also writes family history. His poetry has been published on various sites including Verse-Virtual, Indian Periodical, Fleas on the dog, Inspired, Open Skies Quarterly, Active Muse, New Verse News and Wry Times. Read his poem “Garden Reading” from The Bluebird Word‘s January 2023 Issue.

When Stars Align

11 April 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Simone Kadden

Schlepping past tailgaters in parking lots isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it was my
mother’s. She stopped to examine a plate, a vase, or a necklace and speak to the vendor about a similar one in a distant place. Then, she’d put it down, and we’d move down the line.

When she was in her nineties and used a walker, we opted to drive into the countryside for our treasure hunts. Traveling along curvy back roads with handwritten road signs, we scrounged odd shops offering catches that otherwise detoured to the dump.

Scavengers have their Holy Grail—tea cups, costume jewelry, bird cages, dishware, and figurines. For us, it was buttons. As a kid, I collected them in a tin when I wasn’t arranging them on the floor. Each was a piece of art, distinct in size, shape, and design.

Aunt Lisel, my mother’s older sister, was my leading supplier. As Head Seamstress at Bergdorf Goodman, Manhattan’s premier department store, she brought buttons from coats, suits, and gowns she altered for the rich and famous. “Where did you get this one, Tante Lisel?” I asked, and she described in detail the article of clothing and its prominent owner.

One day, my mother and I took a 20mph cruise down a sleepy main street in a mountain town. Suddenly, my mother extended her left arm and grabbed my right elbow. “Hold it! Slow down and park the car.” I followed her orders and helped her out of the car. We walked a short distance until we stood before The Button Up, where the window displayed bolts of fabric, yarn, and crocheted throws. Blanketing the entire black floor were buttons, studs, and toggles made of velvet, glass, leather, pearl, rhinestone, and fabrics in vibrant colors, dazzling like the night’s brightest stars.

“When you were little, we collected buttons and kept them in a container, remember?” my mother asked, without turning from the display.

“Of course, I remember. We had a tin with triangle-shaped wafers on the lid we always struggled with, as if its bottom were bigger than its top.”

My mother laughed at what she had forgotten. “On rainy days when you were a little girl, we sat on the floor for hours, spreading them out and making pictures.”

“Remember when we had enough duplicates to design twins?” I asked, to which she knowingly nodded.

I still had the collection at home and wanted to go spill out all the buttons, thinking, like a Ouija board, they’d offer a mysterious projection into the future.

“When I was four,” my mother began, “my wild imagination was my best friend after my mother died, and I dreamed the impossible. My grandmother’s apartment was on the first floor of our house. I loved to visit her and thought my mother would be there, hiding behind the couch or under the bed where I liked to crawl.

“My grandmother would take all her buttons from a black silk coin purse and create designs on the dining table. ‘Let’s make something pretty that your mother would have loved,’ my grandmother would say. Sometimes she mentioned one button came from my grandfather’s coat or another was from my mother’s sweater. It was a lovely distraction for a sad little girl.

“The emerald glass buttons, the enamel ones with gold filigree, and the square silver-plated ones found homes in my creations. The jewel tones reminded me of my mother’s green eyes, though her jewels had gold flecks dancing in them.

“One autumn day, during the afternoon’s waning hours, Oma Julie entered the room with the silver tray holding hot cocoa and homemade butter cookies. She placed the tray on the table, and from the buffet, she retrieved a bundle tied with a purple ribbon. I unwrapped it to find a deep burgundy velvet pillow, the color of grapes in the vineyards that blanketed the hillsides. Sewn on the pillow were buttons duplicating the image we last created. A little face (me!), a house with a black chimney churning out brown and gray buttons resembling smoke, yellow and white flowers, and the sun peeking out from the pillow’s corner.”

My mother wanted to show her mother what she and Oma Julie had created, even
though my mother didn’t know when that might be. Her sweet memory continued.

“I hugged Oma Julie’s tiny frame and put my face against her neck. I inhaled the jasmine-scented soap she used. The warmth of Grandma Julie’s body encircling mine, the scent of freshly baked cookies, and the beautiful pillow left me missing my mother more than ever, and I unraveled into tears. My lost mother, wherever she was, had come from this petite woman, and in my child’s mind, I thought my mother might be nearby and return to the place from which she came.

“My Grandmother slowly pulled away from me. Her gentle hands cupped the sides of my head. She looked at me intently, as if hoping I would record the moment within my young soul.

“‘Gretel,’ Oma Julie said softly, ‘this pillow is for both of us. What we share is ours forever. We will keep this pillow as a reminder that people sometimes leave us and don’t return, but they are not lost. Every day we find them again. We only need to know where to look.’”

My mother sighed deeply and shifted her gaze from The Button Up window to me, indicating the story had ended. She looked at me with what I believe was the same look her grandmother gave her 90 years earlier. With a slight shake of her head, as if releasing a moment, my mother asked, “Now, how about some hot cocoa and cookies?”

It sounded like a tender toast to another time.

My mother stores her memories like a squirrel stashing nuts within a tree trunk. She retrieves them one by one, and when the stars align, she reaches for her silver tray.

Simone Kadden lives in Madrid with her husband and rescue dog, Lulita. She’s collected stories, relationships, jobs, and dogs in Manhattan, DC, Chicago, Boston, and Sonoma County. She taught at Harvard, worked at The Washington Post and on U.N.-sponsored projects, and wrote two books for the University of Michigan Press.

close up dirty door door knob — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The Trapped Door

12 March 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Daniella DiMaggio

When I was a girl, my grandma showed me a trapdoor in our house. She lived in the basement apartment, where the trapdoor was. I want to say that the door was by the staircase or in the alcove where the washer and dryer were, but I truly cannot remember. When you opened the door, there was a red ladder that took you far down into a white room that was filled with wonders that I cannot recall now. In my mind’s eye, it was filled with toys, and it was vaster than vast. It was the universe, ever expanding.

I want to say that I visited this trapdoor multiple times in my childhood. And I want to say that it was not in one single instance that this door disappeared. I want to say that as I continued to visit it, the door became more and more transparent; the handle, at first, difficult to turn, and then impossible to find. I want to say that the square outline of the door slowly faded into the wall.

I have many dreams that I’m somehow journeying through the foundation of my childhood home. In the dream, it doesn’t always look like my childhood home, but I know that’s what it is. There are secret passageways in the walls that allow me to contort and climb through. They don’t do much of anything other than transport me from one room to another.

I’m reminded of when my sister and I were girls sharing a room. We had a large white dresser, it almost reached the ceiling (or maybe I just thought this because I was small), and she used to climb on top of it and crawl across it to my bed. It wasn’t until we were older that we realized how dangerous this was, the top half of the dresser not being nailed down to the bottom half. My sister never realized that she was a precarious leaf on a branch. We laugh about it now.

I sometimes wonder if the trapdoor disappeared or if I disappeared. If I became stuck down there and slowly the wonders just vanished, and one day, a day close to my dying, in a new long lived-in house of my adult years (a house I’ve yet to even meet), I will discover a small square frame with a knob and realize that no one has been looking for me.

Daniella DiMaggio is a recent graduate of the Queens College MFA Program where she studied fiction. She teaches at Queens College and Plaza College.

Later

14 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Robert Nisbet

By now he was washing his feet
with difficulty, ached a lot
most mornings, but always he walked,
first with the dog, then, when she’d gone,
striding alone round his domain.

It was a tour of inspection, decades
of shift and character and happening,
remembered and re-created.
Most treasured of all, the Common,
its cricket pitches and its trees.

His initials and Moira’s were carved,
fading, blurred but readable still,
in the mighty oak beside the seconds’ pitch.
His sons, the crowds, the matches,
once, the breathless pleasure
of his granddaughter’s single game.

Walking back, through unexceptional streets,
he would trawl his shoal of recollections,
alliances and families, time’s dole,
how Moira married the aircraftsman,
but that didn’t in the end gainsay
the good of all that happened otherwise.

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet, a now-retired English teacher and college lecturer, who wrote short stories for forty years (with seven collections) and has now turned to poetry, being published widely in both Britain and the USA, where he is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee.