Nic Narrates

I thought of you today. I do most days, but sitting on the train, looking out the window, I saw something that made me remember you all at once.

The train was pushing south and I watched as the trees collected more leaves and buds the farther from Chicago I traveled. The country fields sat waiting to be overturned, plowed, tilled. The sky hung low and overcast, a lull before a downpour. And beside the train tracks, clapboard farmhouses and dirt roads and garage sales slipped by. Rural routes, horse trailers, daffodils and lilacs.

Mile after mile, old telephone poles, long forgotten, their wires come unstrung, followed the train route. They stood dilapidated now, low to the ground, and still capped by rainbow of glass insulators. And I remembered…

I was a little girl when I held the blue glass in my hand, asking you what it was. You collected them, found them along old roads. They had no use to the telephone companies anymore and sometimes fell to the ground. You’d pick them up, holding them up to the sun light, then take them home with you. Old glass, you’d say.

You were like that- always seeing worthwhileness in places and people and things that had been cast off or forgotten or disliked. A crooked nail, half a bowl of cereal left for months in all those cereal boxes, a forlorn pair of dungarees. Treasures all, to you.

Looking out at the wealth of old glass left behind on pole after pole as my train passed by, I wished I could reach my hand out the window and capture each one. I wished I could bring them to you and see you smile at what I had done. I wished I could hold one in my hand again. Your treasure now my treasure too.

But you’re not here anymore, and five years later, they still haven’t buried your ashes. There’s no smile to see, no one to bring these treasures to, not even a grave upon which to place this memory.

I thought of you today and the granddaughter I was to you then, the granddaughter I wish I could still be to you now.

Filed under: a thing of beauty, childhood, family, in memory, just say 'when', nostalgia by Nic