Unwrapping a Memory

This memory right here, see? Yes, the one tucked carefully between Girl Scout Camp and swimming lessons. Its wrapped so carefully I almost forgot I left it there. It hurts to take it out, like pulling band-aids off the slow, painstaking way. I don’t unwrap it often. The scene is just so perfect and the summer air so balmy that I can’t even start the tape of replaying the memory before I want to be back there. Summer days were the best. They always were.

We woke up with the birds, a sweet alarm trilling through the morning air. Even at the tender age of 9, I started the day with coffee. Of course she filled the mug with a half-cup of milk and a Grandma-sized tablespoon of sugar as well. We sat outside on the dock, in those rusted metal chairs that aren’t supposed to rock, but do if you bounce your leg just right. The waves whisper their good mornings: to the wizened lady decked out in a blue-grey housecoat with twin grey braids pinned to the top of her head, to the tanned girl with the sleepy eyes beside her, to the swooping sea gulls catching a breakfast meal.

The day like any other July day, Grandma eating peanut butter off a spoon for breakfast, washing it down with cupfuls of milk. Me eating toast made from bread kept in the fridge: everything got so damp near the water.

Chores came next: running the sweeper whose mouth was so small it hardly picked up more than a lint at a time, making my bed and straightening the couch cover where she slept, emptying the ashtrays, weeding between the rows of tomatoes in the garden. The house was tiny, a cottage really. It didn’t take long.

Next was a lukewarm shower in the rickety stand up shower, water pump churning when I had been in for longer than four minutes. I can still smell the Irish Spring and the dampness of that tiny bathroom.

But the best part of the day came around three o’clock. After our chores and bathing, neighbor visiting and lunch, we put our pajamas back on and settled in to read. She laying on her striped couch with a well-worn mystery, me in the flowered chair nearby. We read and read till dinner, then read some more. The only thing better than the reading was the pudding. Always butterscotch pudding with whipped cream and a maraschino on top. Perfection.

So here I sit on my own porch with the birds, today’s coffee more caffeine than milk, my sweet sleeping daughter well on her way to being the young girl I was so many Julys ago. And I have a quiet minute to unwrap this memory, to wish for the innocence I knew, to long for a moment again with the Grandma I love so much.