memories

When I think of my grandfather, random images surface. The smooth, storm-grey arrowhead he tucked in palm one rainy afternoon. The day he taught my brother and I all the words to the song Bicycle Built for Two. I can almost still hear his deep voice intertwine with our tinny childish ones: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you...

I can almost feel our frantic glee as he bounced us on his knee and sang an old, Swedish rhyme that ended in a rollicking “hupsy, hupsy”. I will never smash ping-pong balls in their basement or teeter on the wooden edgings around the gardens. No more croquet in the backyard, or messy crab dinners on the patio. My grandparents' house closed a few weeks ago. My dad and uncle grew up there and that house was the setting for my first memory of snow. I still remember sledding down the steep front yard on my dad’s old sled, rescued from the attic by my fearless grandfather.

An engineer as profession and an artist at heart, my grandfather had an eye for beauty and captured life in scores of paintings. He grew in the midwest, just outside Chicago and lived in Baltimore, MD most of his adult life. Seems his paintings capture both of these worlds - the aching, barren midwest and the sparkling Chesapeake Bay area. After his death three years ago, some of the paintings made their way to my parent’s house. One particular canvas caught my eye as I rifled through their garage earlier this summer. Now this painting, a scene of the park across the street from my grandpa’s childhood home, hangs in my bedroom and invites me to remember and enjoy these fractured moments.