The old couple who lived here were my grandparents. The house is gone – obviously. The two story structure remains fixed in my childhood memory for its sunny porches, for its wood burning stove in the kitchen, for its grate in the floor of the upstairs bedroom that let warm air tinged with the the scent of woodsmoke and strong coffee brewing waft up from the main floor in the early morning hours……and for its color. My grandfather, a jack-of-all-trades (one of which included house painting), chose to paint his own home pink. Not just a fade into the background, pale pink. Oh no – his house was flamingo pink! Not only was his house pink, but his car was pink as well. And in his pocket he always carried those round, chalky pink mints, which he freely passed out to grandchildren and kids on his school bus route. All this was long before Mary Kay Ash developed her pink cosmetic empire. My salt-of-the-earth Grandpa just plain liked pink.
Before he earned his living painting houses and driving school bus, Grandpa owned and operated the local creamery. Dairy farmers used to bring their milk in daily, whereupon Grandpa and his two or three employees would separate the cream, churn the butter, prepare the buttermilk, and make the ice cream. Deliveries were made in the pink car. It was a real family business; Grandma kept the books, and my Dad and his younger brother earned 5 cents a day helping to churn butter and make deliveries. Grandpa and Grandma survived the Great Depression on the proceeds of the creamery, which oftentimes came in the form of a bushel of apples or a dozen eggs, because cold hard cash was so hard to come by. My Dad, who grew from a lad of 5 to a teenager during the depression, says he never even realized that times were tough. It was just the way life was in those days.
Next to the house Grandpa always put in a huge garden. He grew potatoes and carrots, strawberries, corn, and beans – both green and yellow. I don’t remember that he ever grew tomatoes or lettuce or broccoli or cauliflower or cabbage. He was a simple man in many ways, given to simple ways and simple tastes. He had spent a year in the trenches of France during WWI and treated each day as a gift. For her part, Grandma grew hollyhocks and asparagus. Her asparagus patch was by the shed out back. Her rule was to stop cutting the asparagus on the 4th of July. I don’t suppose she ever broke that rule. Asparagus simmered in milk and butter, with lots of saltine crackers crumbled into the milky mixture was one of her specialties, along with “Minnesota” potatoes – potatoes chopped fine and pan fried in lard with a generous seasoning of salt and pepper. She never exercised a day in her life yet she outlived my active grandpa by a quarter of a century. You would think with her sedentary lifestyle and with all of the fat and cholesterol she used in her cooking, her heart and arteries would have rebelled at a much younger age, but somehow she managed to survive until a month shy of her 106th birthday. That was a decade ago.
Summers at my grandparent’s house meant long hours playing outdoors. In addition to his garden, Grandpa also grew Christmas trees. Grandpa and Dad used to go out to the “tree farm” on hot summer days to trim the trees, pruning and shaping them with a few well-placed snips, preparing them for a December harvest. I would sometimes come along and play pioneer games amongst the shady trees while they worked, imagining myself a little Laura Ingalls living in the Big Woods. Other days were spent at the lake. To get to the swimming beach we would ride our Schwinn one-speed bikes — with the baskets in front loaded with paper bag lunches – down the country road into town, through the alley behind the old Davis place, and across the street. My little sister and I, and sometimes a cousin or two, would swim like fish for an entire day. My brother, on the other hand, would often spend his entire day fishing in the lake, bringing home fresh sunfish, northern, or walleye that he would clean and give to Grandma to prepare for our supper. Somewhere in my parent’s photo album back home is a fuzzy Polaroid of my brother and my cousin holding a nice stringer of fish, my proud Grandpa looking on.
After Grandpa died, Grandma lived alone in the pink house. Before long she had her sons repaint it a more “respectable” white. I can only assume she allowed the house to be pink as a concession to my Grandpa and her great love for him. When she died, the house, with all of its memories, was put up for sale. Eventually the new owners had it torn down. The garden and the asparagus patch gave way to weeds and wild grasses. The once-tended acres of trees grew far too big to decorate anyone’s living room. Today, I don’t even know who owns the land that my imagination and I once roamed freely across.
It always nicks my heart when I drive past this place now, not just because of the loss created by my Grandparent’s absence, but also because of how quickly time can erase our material existence. I doubt another passerby would even give it a second glance. Where there is emptiness, we easily turn away and forget. I am like a weary desert sojourner, seeing a shimmering, sun-induced mirage…images of a home, of a history, of human beings. I cup these images in my hand and carry them – precious — like water. Even the nothingness of memory has weight. And I realize that the space I inhabit will someday fade. I, too, will return to field-swept breezes, overgrown trees and grasses, dark, fertile earth. My existence on earth will become someone else’s precious images, faded snapshots of the life I lived and the love I shared.
With a sudden start I return to the present. I turn my Chevy Malibu back onto the county road and drive on, feeling slightly lost in the in-between. Past. Present. Loss. Progress. Extinction. Vitality. History. Potential.
Rumor has it that the town is expanding in this direction. The land has become valuable. Someday soon there will be plans to subdivide it, to build efficient homes sporting nondescript vinyl siding, landscaped lawns, and paved driveways leading to three-car attached garages that house mini-vans and hybrid cars. Perhaps the new owners will never wonder about who came before them. They will be caught up in the living of their own lives, with the making of their own history. There will be lawns to mow, snow to shovel, kids to raise, groceries to buy, wages to earn. They will be working hard, trying to make a good life for themselves, a better life for their children. But I’m pretty sure none of their houses or cars will be flamingo pink.
