Nana

Nana, my father’s mother, lived with us in an apartment over the kitchen; what used to be maid’s quarters back in the day. Narrow stairs led up to her private enclave. She had a formal dining room separate from her apartment; a circular room with floor to ceiling windows looking out over the marshlands and the epic rock formation covering half an acre. Blood red carpet was like velvet on my bare feet. The children were not allowed in this room and we had to knock to gain entrance to her seaside Victorian apartment.

Family lore tells me she was an ambulance driver during WWI. Quite plausible, noting her father was a surgeon and her sister a nurse. Nana was a force in hose and heels. Her warm moments were sparse and you were lucky to bask in her adoration. Perfection paved the road to her heart. More often than not, we were too much, too loud, too careless, too slovenly, too disrespectful…too many. Tugging on our ear, dragging us into a room if a light was left on, berating us if barefoot. If we heard her coming down the back stairs we’d yell, “NC!” — short for Nana’s coming and we’d scatter like cockroaches.

I remember her smiling with bits of cottage cheese lodged between her teeth after lunch: cottage cheese with dates, walnuts and apples. Hot tea with milk. Nana chewed soundlessly — mouth closed like a trap, as if chewing your food was something indecent. Sometimes we’d get a slight backhand if we chewed with our mouths open:

“Stop smacking your food, you sound like an animal.”

The afternoon sun glorified her tiny kitchen, rebounding off the Fleur-de-lis tin canisters of sugar and tea. She painted here in the afternoons when the light beamed a narrow dusty halo. I remember hypnotic smells of fresh brewed tea, ginger, toast, oil paints, and brackish wool. It is here she made wafer thin oatmeal cookies, Finnish coffee bread, and the over cooked spinach and green beans she’d bring down to supper, late, when we were nearly done eating. Nearly done our captivity and could be excused. Forcing down those vegetables was like daily penance.

I never made coffee bread or cookies with her. She taught the older ones, I think. How might my life be different today, and that of my children, if I had been invited into the process? Perhaps today I’d have those canisters sitting on my kitchen counter alongside a recipe box full of index cards in her handwriting, an oil painting of hers gracing the walls.

By the time I came into her world in 1966, she was grandmother to twenty-three. The nostalgia long gone and her eldest son, my father, falling apart.