Side note: This entry is ALL over the place. But I feel in the spirit of reminiscing, I am going to leave it unedited.
It is weird for me to go to the town I was born in. I only lived there for the first four years of my life but most of my favourite childhood memories are from time spent visiting in that little town of 2,100 people.
My grandparents, many of my aunts and uncles on my mom’s side of the family and most of my cousins lived in ‘Hazy’ (as I’ll call it) and, as I child, we went to visit there quite often. The cousins always had so much fun raising hell in our grandparent’s basement, where our parents often dropped us off to do what we wished while the adults socialized upstairs.
It’s hard for me to believe that the days of hanging out with my cousins in that basement are long gone even though it’s been years since I have been in the basement with my cousins. Whenever I go to my Grandma’s now, I am reminded of all of the amazing times I had in Hazy during every summer of my childhood, every family get together, every Christmas.
Things are different at my Grandma’s now and it makes me sad to be there. Don’t get me wrong, I love visiting my Grandma and other relatives in Hazy but it breaks my heart being at her house. The obvious reason is that my Grandpa is no longer there anymore. It’s interesting though, because even though he’s not there I can still feel him in the house. I can still picture his spot at the kitchen table and his spot on the couch that’s no longer there.
While he was in the hospital last summer, there were little things lying around the house that showed Grandpa had been there recently – namely, his harmonica and his Toronto Maple Leaf slippers. I remember when we were visiting him while he was in the hospital, Melina was walking around the house with his slippers on and I had to make her take them off. Just out of respect, I guess.
I always enter my Grandma’s house with a heavy heart now, knowing Grandpa isn’t there to make silly jokes and whistle all day. I remember once when I was much younger, Grandpa made a joke about “hor'deurves”, calling them “horse overs.” Haha. I miss his stories at the supper table and his yummy garden veggies.
I know he’s still around and can feel his presence at the house sometimes. It’s hard to accept, though, that things will never be the same again. Hazy is a different little town now without my Grandpa as a physical part of it. Every time I have visited my Grandma in this past year, more and more changes are being made to her house. They’re good changes, like making small updates to the house. But it feels weird seeing things change in a house that went without change for so many years. I still miss the dark brown carpet in their upstairs living room that they had for so many years. It was thick carpet and attracted cat hair like crazy so it was a pain in the butt to keep clean but, dammit, that rug was a huge help in making epic, huge card castles!
I really don’t know where I was heading with this blog entry. I wanted to make note of the things that I miss about my hometown but it just goes hand-in-hand with my Grandpa’s passing.
I want Melina to be able to make memories at my Grandma’s house, the way that I made memories there growing up. Every time we go to visit, we pass a building or a landmark in the town that reminds me of something I experienced as a child – my first time tasting wine at a cousins wedding in the hall by my Grandma’s house (which led to my first alcohol-induced headache), hanging out at the local bank because it was the ‘cool’ place to be (or so I thought at the time), going to classes at the library during the summer, taking library books home without signing them out because my sister told me that there was a specific rack of books you could just take for free ( I still don’t know if there’s any truth to this), hanging out at the vintage-feeling ice cream shop my relatives owned, going into the bar underage to do a shot at the town’s centennial celebration (you’re not reading this, are you, Mom?) and the list goes on.
But the memories made around the city are nothing compared to the memories made with my family at my grandparents house – hanging out in the basement with Candace and having a ‘who can hold their arm up in the air the longest’ contest because we saw it on an episode of Survivor (I think we held it up for over an hour), looking through the scary storage area under the basement stairs and scaring each other down there because it was legit scary sometimes, traumatizing my slightly younger cousins with stories of Michael Smith (sorry Delaney) and other scary stories (sorry Brandi), throwing rocks at cars that pass by (okay, that was once and I was really young and a man got out of his car and yelled at us and that never happened again), being summer friends with the kids who lived next door, playing in the ball diamonds behind Grandma’s house, watching ball at the ball diamonds, having the whole family manage a huge sleepover in my grandparents house during every family get together (especially Christmas! That house is packed!), going to the outdoor swimming pool by the house, cabbage rolls and cucumber salad and other yummies that only Grandma’s can make, getting ran over by a boy on a bicycle in the driveway of my grandparents house (I swear this happened but no one has confirmed or denied it for me. It may have been a dream. But I distinctly remember my white blouse having tire marks across it haha), visiting with the family on the patio, listening to Grandpa fill the house with his harmonica playing, watching The Price is Right with Grandpa and the hockey games with Grandma (who cheers louder than anyone I’ve ever heard), Grandpa always saying “yeah, whatever”, going out to the farm with Grandpa to see what life was like there and learn a little bit about farming (none of which, I retained) and the list goes on and on and on...
I think a part of me doesn’t want to believe that I’m an ‘adult’ now with a husband and a family because I don’t want to let go of that part of my life. I know it’s part of my past now but I am going to do everything in my power to make sure I don’t forget how many great times I had in Hazy even though things have changed forever now.
Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.
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