For Thanksgiving this year, everyone was home except for Greg (who was dearly missed). With cousins to play with and aunts and uncles to entertain them, the grandkids were in a state of bliss. Thus, I was surprised one evening with Zach said to me, “Grandma, can you play with me?” I was flattered, but had a twin in one arm, was heading to the basement to help Brooke with a computer game, and to grab something from the storage room for dinner. I told him, “Yes”, but it was several minutes before I made it to the cars and little people he was playing with. Savannah was thrilled to be included in the play, and kept jumping in my arms to get a better view. I clearly didn’t understand the rules of playing with cars. We were playing a game of chase, but I wasn’t limber enough or quick enough to ever catch him and kept resorting to flying cars, which was evidently illegal.
After a while he said, “Are you good at trains?” The train set in the basement spans two tables at different levels. Playing trains invariably means constructing tracks with bridges, lifts, and curves. While I’m not good with a single table, two tables make it twice as hard. You have to manage the gap and level change, in addition to making the parts connect and stay on the table. Zach and I have played trains before, but I’m really BAD at it. I do great in the first half of the assembly, but for some reason, the track pieces that I need to finish the task just haven’t been invented yet. His father, on other hand, is a pro – making elaborate designs that would make the toy catalogs jealous. [If Brandon gets bored as a civil engineer, I think he’s got options with Thomas & Friends. ]
Anyway, when Zach asked, “Are you good at trains?” I responded honestly, “No, I’m pretty terrible at trains.” To which he responded, “You just put the tracks together like this until they connect. It’s easy to me.” I loved it.
It got me thinking about my relationship with my grandparents. Grandma and Grandpa Lasson lived on a farm in Birdseye, Utah. The, then, three hour drive to Spanish Fork canyon seemed unbearable, and was filled with carsickness and lots of “Are we there yet?” and “He’s touching me”, but the pain of getting there was the only negative. The house was heated by a wood burning stove, but the warmth of their adoration was even more intense. Everything I said was treasured and (nearly) everything I did was admired. Grandma was always willing to teach me a new card game while Grandpa played an unending game of Solitaire, with cards so warped I wondered how he could shuffle them.
Like my mother, Grandma was a candy addict and a great cook. We quickly demolished the salt water taffy she always kept on hand and relished the cookies she prepared just for us.
My grandparent’s home was small with memories embedded in the architecture – the ice house was transformed into a shed and the backyard was graced with an outhouse which still functioned if you couldn’t quite make it to the small bathroom inside the house. There was much laughter as Grandma and Grandpa reflected on out-house pranks and remembered weekly visits of the iceman.
A bedroom had been added to one corner, eliminating the need for the three sisters to sleep in the living room on a pull out bed. Mom would laugh that her sisters abhorred the fact that she was a bed wetter, yet they still had her sleep between them. There was no basement, but a cellar had been dug out under the kitchen. The only way to get to it was to lift up a section of the kitchen floor. For a child, the house was magical.
Grandpa was a farmer, raising chickens, cattle, and hay. They had horses for us to ride and haystacks that we would climb and slide down. I never heard one complaint about the mess we made of the hay stacks, though they must have secretly been happy when our car pulled out of the lane that connected their home to the highway. My cousins lived a stone’s throw away, so there was always someone to spur an adventure to the “Old Place” to catch pollywogs or tiny fish in the stream. We often cajoled an adult into saddling the horses for a trot to round mountain.
I guess the magic of their home was felt by all of us, as when my Aunt died a few years ago, my siblings and I took an afternoon to return to my Grandparent’s home. Devoid of parents and grandparents, the home still had the power to take us into the past. It has boarded up and in need of repair, but the magic we felt being there was still powerful.
