Grandma’s house

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

“Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go....” It took all of the verses of the song, sung several times through, to get us to Grandma and Grandpa’s house on Thanksgiving Day. Since my family often sang during car trips when I was young, I measured distance by the number of songs it took, not the number of miles. You are My Sunshine, The Bull Frog Song, Froggy Went A Courtin’ were regulars, as was 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall for longer trips. During the holidays, we included our seasonal favorites. “Hurrah for the fun; is the pudding done, Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!” Since timing was everything, we tried to finish the song as we pulled up to the gate. As we stepped onto the front porch, the sounds of laughter and wafts of roasting turkey and cornbread stuffing greeted us. Opening the…

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Backyard Grape Arbor

There is a time portal in my back yard. It looks deceptively like an ordinary grape trellis arched over the wooden gate leading to my rose garden. However, it harbors the magic to transport me back through time and space to my grandmother’s grape arbor—the way it was when I was five years old. Grandma’s grape arbor was a mystical green tunnel. It spanned the distance between the bottom steps of her back porch and the gate that led to the vegetable garden. My childhood memory tells me that it went for at least a mile. I know now that it was about 15 feet long. Each year, I watched with awe its transformation from a wire archway lined with brown dead sticks to a green leafy passageway of graceful vines and grasping tendrils. And, when the clusters of tiny green pearls swelled into huge clusters of purple balls, it…

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