Grandmother’s House
by Charlie Thompson
2025, June 15th
biochemistry student
Mississippi State University
Mississippi State University
My grandmother's house was always overshadowed by her mothers. They shared a driveway, with one path taking you to a very humble ranch style country home, and the other taking you to a foreboding colonial/plantation home. The difference was that my great grandmother had been dead since before I was given life. Her house was cast out to gather dust, gather vines, gather termites, roaches. I hold two memories of that place, well one is a compilation of memories that all have the same flavor; my grandmother would take me on bright summer afternoons to that house, where ancient playground equipment lay, rusted. A trampoline too if I recall correctly. I would entertain myself as the metal squeaked and moaned after not being used for decades, likely. My grandmother would always sit in silence. She glared at the old house, she spoke endlessly of her mother, she fingered the vines that now completely engross the brick walls. A childhood full of people, her mother, father, two siblings, her family's 'helpers' (no doubt the people who'd actually worked the land for decades, maybe longer), now reduced to her alone and heronly grandchild. My great-grandmother's forest-green Oldsmobile sat in the carport of that house, it was the only thing not covered in dust. My grandmother still took it for drives, when I was with her I tagged along. It was the first car I ever drove, the only living, breathing (guzzling, churning) testament I had to my great-grandmother.
I had only ever been inside it once; it was when my grandmother and her siblings finally split up their mother's estate (there had been a two decade long inheritance battle), before that day, and ever since, the interior of that great house has been forbidden, behind lock and key, under surveillance - no exaggeration. Ever since those iridescent afternoons with my grandmother in the house's lawn, playing with the ancient swings and slides, I had built up a fantasy as to what the inside of the house may look like. The years before I got to breach the great entrance to the home I was quite entranced with
French history so I imagined the house having an aristocratic flair. It was elegantly decorated in a Mid-Century Modern style. Obviously nothing in the place had been touched for years, covered in a sheen of dusty debris. I remember thinking (in my 14 year old or so taste mind you) that the house would still look rather serviceable if the dust were just magically blown away. The furniture was not demodé and it was at this time, and still is, that colonial style houses were coming back into fashion. The kitchen showed its age.
My grandmother stayed dejected through the whole affair, I could only imagine, looking back on it now, the dusty recesses of her mind being reignited; imagining scenes as they happened, running around the house as a kid, blowing the dust up from the old dilapidated house. The house was unceremoniously divvied up into rooms for each sibling, my grandmother got three rooms, her mothers bedroom, the living room, and the foyer of the stairs (kind of a cheap-out I always thought, though it had a beautiful antique square piano that still rots there to this day). The only thing of value she took was my great-grandmother's jewelry, or what was left that she hadn't given to her two daughters during her life. Most things were too cumbersome, too expensive, or too ruined to even think of rescuing from the old house, and so many things remain there today. Collecting dust and losing their memories.
A small pasture separated the two, for my grandmother lived alone, she was better suited for her little ranch-style in the woods. When you drove down her path of the driveway it was as if you'd veered off, taken a wrong turn, for it was again shadowed by trees and canopy as the road was before it. But soon, you would descend upon her home, and the canopy would escape and the sunlight would brighten and reflect off the black roof tiles and the bright red brick. The entire property was meticulously well-kept, there was a large garden plot that was always stuffed with produce (this triggered a constant back-and-forth with the local deer population), and she kept this garden astutely maintained until she was in her late seventies. My grandmother is a turtle of a woman. Her whole home was a turtle in itself, insulated from the outside world. Sometimes I thought I was the only person she'd show her amenable side to, as soon as my father came around she crawled back inside her little shell. Somehow I always felt like she expected a grand state of maturity from me, she held me in this regard, she gave me her respect, and I often held up to it. Only one time I insulted her precious silver and she called me a "jackass". The silver was a gift from her mother, a woman I'd never known. My grandmother soon got new plastic swing-sets and slides and a trampoline for her house, I think I called them "cheap" one time. She told me that I would appreciate them one day.
It's a time when I don't know who really knows me, I don't know if I really know myself. I don't know what it means to be myself or what is myself. I think it's more of a race, I'm trying to catch up to some internal schema of my life, and so is everyone else that thinks cares for me. Maybe that's all wrong. Maybe I am in the middle of the field and all of my internal schemas of myself are running toward all those who care about me and their own perceptions of me. I think my grandmother knows me. she has known me tangentially enough to see the parts that are real and miss the parts that are a façade, and she's been there to see the real my whole life. I'll sit alone one day, in the yard of that old ranch house, watching my kid swing, and maybe I'll realize who I am, or what I was.