The house was a whirling fury, at times, and that was what she liked, at times.
An old man took the turn into the driveway hesitantly. He parked, pushed against the car door with all his might and shuffled his body of old bones up the long drive. It was maybe 15 feet. I met him at the door, worried he would have trouble negotiating the two steps to the porch.
He said he almost didn’t drive anymore, but he had to get in the car and come down for a visit. His wife had cut my grandmother’s hair for years. He’d cut my grandfather’s. And they, he said, always had a friend in him. You had to speak up, he said as he pointed to his hearing aid, he’d left that in the war with General George Patton. And he and his wife of more than 70 years thought the world of my family.
A woman stopped by who just loved them to pieces. She is my mother’s age, one of the dozens of kids that were raised through this house. It must have been a sight to see. She promised me great tales on my mother, my uncle and my grandparents. We will schedule a day to dish dirt.
And that was the way it went. Food came in all day, from people you knew and names you’d heard and people you couldn’t pick out of a lineup. People stayed and hugged and laughed and left and more people came and hugged and laughed. Stories were told and laughs were shared and I heard of memories that explain basic things, like the way particular words are said in my family, that I’d never heard before.
People to see, people to fuss over. That was the tenor and tone and almost always the expectation. People to tell her stories to and to grimace and laugh with. People to feed and send them on their way so they could come back by again.
It was an almost perfect whirling fury. Almost. Almost, and far from it.
