Snippets 1 - Grandma's House

I rolled on the rug and laughed but I wasn’t having fun. My cousin was in her teens, more than ten years older. She held me down, dug her fingers into my ribs. I howled with laughter. She laughed too but not like when she thought something was funny. The rug smelled musty. I tried to get away but couldn’t. So I rolled on the rug and laughed, even though the rug was dirty.

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A powdered sugar doughnut and a glass of milk, cold milk, one of my favorite snacks. We still lived at Grandma’s house, I was at the kitchen table where years before my Grandfather, father and uncles all sat gobbling their meals during the Great Depression. I felt their absence or maybe their presence. My parents were in the next room making angry noise. Grandma was washing dishes at the sink with her back to me. She turned toward the other room and smiled. When I lifted my glass the oilcloth tablecloth pulled at the skin on my arm.

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It was morning in my room. Vague shadows lingered in the far corners of my room, in the nooks and crannies of my room. Sunshine streamed through the open window of my room and bathed my room with warm bright light. I felt the gaps between the floorboards on the bottoms of my feet. The world outside was green. Today I would explore the vacant lot behind the house, Grandma’s house. My room was once Uncle Pete’s. He lived here when he was a kid during the Great Depression and he wore knickers. My dad and Uncle Bill shared the bedroom down the hall that my parents lived in now. It was time to get dressed, but my mother wasn’t here. My clothes were here, neatly folded on my chair. What if I dressed myself? Could I? I’d seen other kids button their shirts or sweaters out of line, or mistie their shoes, and the grown-ups laughed. I didn’t like when the grown-ups laughed, but I ran through the whole procedure in my mind and decided I could do it. I made sure to start my shirt buttons at the bottom, using the bottom-most button in the bottom-most hole, and then skipped no buttons or holes on the way up. I traced my finger along my belt to make sure it was in all the loops, checked that my zipper was zipped and my shoes were on the proper feet. I was surprised to find I even knew how to tie my laces. With swelling chest, I presented myself downstairs where several grown-ups were sitting around a table talking.

“What’s this?” they cried. “All dressed?”

“Well well well.”

“Aren’t you a big boy!”

Then, smiling at one another, they said, “Let’s see how you did.”

After a close inspection they looked at one another and said, “He got everything right.”

Then someone patted me on the head and they went back to their grown-up talk.