… that’s what I decided this weekend as I helped clean out my grandmother’s house with my mother and my aunts and uncles. I wasn’t there necessarily to see how many useless items I could accumulate (although others were). I went primarily to help my mom who is both emotionally drained and exhausted from taking care of Nana for the last two years since my grandfather died. At 90, my grandmother remains as feisty and belligerent as always, but a recent stroke has left her unable to live on her own. And so it was decided that the time had come to sell the house my grandfather had built in 1958.
The house was modest by most standards, but, like my grandparents, it was sturdy and practical. The 5-room, brick ranch was sparse on the inside, but because my grandfather was a landscaper by trade, it boasted beautiful gardens, well-manicured ivy and many statues and small touches that were foreign to most other houses in that neighborhood.
My grandfather took great pride in his yard and spent most of his spare time in the garden. My grandmother resented the time he spent manicuring his yard, as she felt that his time would be better spent helping her inside the house. She scoffed the pristinely-cut boxwood, the euonymus he shaped into forms, and the ivy that grew over the side and front of the house. The only thing she did not begrudge him was the rows of tomatoes, beans, lettuce, and fig trees he produced each year.
Remarkably, Poppy had several fig trees that he dug up and buried each winter and up righted each Spring. The winters were long for my grandfather, as he was mostly housebound and susceptible to my grandmother’s wrath. He would grow pale and watch his soap operas to pass the time. At the first sign of spring, he would be outside despite my grandmother’s protests. It wouldn’t be long before he’d show color in his face again, and his skin would become dark, true to his native Italian heritage.
Poppy had what we called his “office” on the side of the large garage that housed the machines for the Landscaping business he had started in 1963. The office had a refrigerator, a table and chair, and an old radio that was always tuned to the Italian or Spanish stations. The office was where Poppy kept his Pequot Soda bottles that he poured out and filled with cheap red wine (My cousins and I used to joke that Pop was likely the inventor of the wine spritzer). There was a large concrete stove that he built behind the garage where he would make soups and sauces. When it wasn’t in use, my cousins and I used to climb on it and think we were on top of the world.
Next to the stove was a large slab of marble that pop had repurposed into a table that sat under his grapevines. It seemed that when the grapes were ripe, you could smell them as soon as you pulled up the long driveway. The grapes were never good for eating, but my grandmother made jelly from them every year.
And the tomatoes. He had the biggest and best tomatoes of anyone I ever knew. He built himself a makeshift greenhouse in the backyard where he would start his seedlings. Then when they were big enough, he would plant them and tend to them all summer long. Every time I’d go there, he’d have me get a bag from the house so he could send me home with tomatoes.
One year, his garden yielded a 3-pound tomato, and he was so proud of it that we snapped a picture of him holding it. It’s the picture we would show him when his memory became dim a few years later. He’d smile at it, recognizing himself. It’s that picture of him that I have in my kitchen now. It’s the picture I think of when his name is mentioned.
Little by little, as my grandfather got older, he gave up a bit more of his garden. It was a lot for someone his age to maintain on his own. Soon the grapes were gone. But he still kept his garden and tried to do as much as possible in the yard. It was ironic that after surviving lung cancer, the thing that eventually led to his demise was his yard.
It was January and the ice and snow had begun to thaw on an unseasonably warm day. He had been looking out the window at an old beach tree in the back yard that needed pruning. At 78, he went and got a ladder and began pruning, but he didn’t tie himself to the tree as he should have. He lost his footing and fell 20 feet, hitting his head and breaking bones in his back and leg. And still, he survived.
But being on respiratory machines left him less than he had been. Doctors thought it was the onset of dementia, but most likely it was lack of oxygen that led to the next few years of childlike behavior. Of course, that too, was not unusual for him. If Pop could do something childish, something that would make us laugh at my grandmother’s expense, he’d do it and continue to do it until she was as mad as a wet hen. It was a game to him. It had always been fun for him to goad my grandmother, a complete control freak.
But nothing made my grandmother more irate than when she prepared dinner, and she could not get Poppy in the house to eat. She would stand on the back stoop with an old cowbell alternately ringing and screaming, “Frank-ie!!!!” until he finally heard her and decided to come in. When we were small, we grandchildren would fight over who was going to ring the cowbell for Pop.
As I looked around the little house that I thought was so big when I was a child, I didn’t want tables or silverware or anything else that the others were all clamoring over. I wanted something that would remind me of Poppy. At first, I thought a statue from the yard might do the trick, but every time I’d mention one, it had been claimed. At the end of the day when we were locking up, my mom was cleaning things off the windowsill, and there was the cowbell. “Can I have that?”, I asked. “You want it? Take it.”
And so it was. The perfect remembrance of both of my grandparents – the old cowbell.
