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With the warm days that have now come, it is inevitable that conversation on the street and in Zup’s and other local haunts turns to Spring and Summer. I’m no weatherman but it just turned March a few days ago and I think that means we’re still short of reprieve by a full couple of months. It doesn’t change our thinking, though, once the days get longer and we’re able to soak up measurable amounts of sunlight, we’re ready.
There were many things about my childhood that stuck in my memory enough to unpack them over and over again in my psyche, my writing and my character. A driving force was my mother’s mother. My Grandmother, Cora Brauer, who I spent a lot of time with and whom I called simply Grandma. She was always there.
Even when I went away to college she would write me letters in her captivating jittery script. She’d tell me about the first Spring flowers and her dog and cat and the moles digging tunnels in her yard and she’d write me a poem.
The poems were always about the two of us and because of the age that I was I read these letters quickly and tucked them away somewhere, abandoning their significance to my immediate concerns. Decades later I’ve found some of those poems, she made copies of course, and my Mom gave me some of those. I discovered with the insight of an adult and now a parent for a quarter-century myself that my leaving home and heading off for college and therefore being absent (alas no cell phones then) broke her heart. I was insensitive to this, and I didn’t really understand, being so self-involved, until something inevitable happened.
Back about 2017, our son left for college. I got it. It felt like a big part of myself was missing, torn away and (alas cell phones don’t really help with this that much) I was extremely lonely at times.
Note: if you have pre-college kids I’ll just say that it didn’t get any easier for me when our daughters left for college either. In short, I had every reason to understand Grandma’s poetry. I had every reason to see that I had left a bigger void behind than I thought possible. That’s what growing up is about. If you have a close family. Sometimes the starlings on the line sing a new song they’ve learned and abandon the old one that was so familiar. Sometimes they take flight and don’t return.
I’ve written a lot about Grandma and I will continue to. I had a great childhood and she was a major reason why. I feel as though it was cut short, suspended if you will, and during that time, when I was learning my new songs, she passed away. When I returned to my roots and to her root cellar where I unwittingly stored and ‘buried’ many of my fondest memories, I discovered that while I had disappeared for a time, she had faithfully remained.
And that’s what she was trying to tell me. I hadn’t “broken” her heart, I was the measure, or one of them, by which her heart beat.
Thanks Grandma, this one’s for you, for summer to come and for all the plastic bread bags you saved for my feet.
Summer
Grandma’s radishes were small and always sweeter with a stronger finish of black pepper than the perfectly round cherry red orbs found at the Super Value Grocery.
She dug hers with a rusted butcher knife she kept stuck in the black musky soil. We’d clean them with her water hose outside after trimming the leafy ends with that same knife.
Inside we’d roll them through a pile of salt and each drop a handful between slices of Wonderbread with Margarine.
If the bread bag was empty we’d shake out the crumbs and fold it to save for the inside of my Moonboots when it began to snow again.
#elystreetpoet ©Timothy James Stouffer All Rights Reserved 03 02 2025
