March 2, 1966 my grandmother died. She was the person in whom I first met death. I regret that my memories of her passing are fragmentary, in fact so much so that, without documentary evidence, I would doubt my recollections.
I do cling to some shards of memory: the phone call to my dorm from my mother telling me that the family had been called to Ma Bertia’s deathbed; the mental image of me standing alone afterward, stunned in my darkened college bedroom room; the sense of being plucked by impending calamity from the routine of my second semester freshman year by the proverbial dying grandmother. I do not recall the over twelve hour road trip from Texas to Alabama-Georgia. I retrieve next views of sitting in an alien never-before-visited apartment where my only grandmother lay dying down the hall. I remember the hushed way that everybody spoke as if their voices wore black crepe. Little of substance remains, only the incidental. The image of the apartment (that today I would call a walk-out mid-century basement) is vivid, as is the bright red and white striped KFC buckets of fried chicken my Uncle “Doc” ordered in for the grief-hungered relatives. I had never before sampled the Colonel’s 11 secret herbed and spiced product. I suppose that is why the memory persists.
I regret that I was incapable of committing to memory my last meeting with my only and dear grandmother. Surely I touched her hand and told her I loved here. But that has escaped me.
I recall some of the funeral and burial. I know that I was there. I see faces not seen for years and hear “My, how you have grown” echoing from people I only vaguely recognize as consanguineous.
The Ole Home Place
But then the next day or the day after, Mother organized for our five-member nuclear family an excursion out to the edge of town to see “The Ole Home Place.” On that exceptional spring day we pulled onto the shoulder of the road beside an almost empty field. A ruined chimney and a large live oak were the only memorable landmarks. As we strolled through the waist-high grass my mother reminisced about her childhood. She shared stories I had heard before and others that the sights prompted her to utter to her children for the first time. Then stopping suddenly, she bend at the waist and picked up a tiny chip of china from between two clumps of wiregrass. She showed me and identified it as belonging to her mother and to her memory. Soon we left to return to our lives out west.
Years later the events come to mind again and I try to make sense of it all, connecting the dots, the stories, the few letters, the photos, the memories. I draft a poem and return to it periodically to revise it. I hope someday to get it right. I share the latest iteration here to assure that the story and the point of it all is not lost.
Pieces
Son and Mother join together
Over blue and shattered pieces
Left from “Granny’s Sunday china.”
“The house is gone but it was here.
At least the chimney still stands tall
To mark the spot and testify
To us and all we were and loved.
Deserted now, ‘twas home to me
Back when . . . I forget . . . Oh! I was
Such a tomboy then with pocket
Knives, overalls, and wild exploits.
Look there! That oak’s the place I jumped
Down upon the cow’s brown back to
Lope around the pasture ‘til she,
Poor thing, would not let down her milk.”
Mom breathes two sighs that muss my hair
Then reaches out her palm to me
With Delftware shards and memories . . .
“Just these and we survive,” She says,
“Pieces . . . Pieces are all we have . . .
Left . . . at last.”
(Revised: 15 Aug 2020)
Indeed, we hold only pieces, but precious and treasured still—fragments though they be.
Sam Matteson 