The annual twenty-four-hour drive from Virginia to Minnesota in our red, fifteen-passenger van always culminated in a welcome under my grandmother’s grape arbor.

All eight, nine, ten, eleven of us would pile out of the van, pass through the gate of her white picket fence suffused in tiger lilies and bleeding hearts and, while one lucky soul was nominated to rap the heavy iron knocker on her brick red back door, the rest of us would congregate under the grape arbor.

There, the cool cement beneath our feet felt expansive after cramped quarters and close confinement.

There the late-afternoon, midsummer sun filtering through the leaves illuminated veins invisibly pulsing with life and backlit grape clusters, sour and small, unripe and unready for our arrival. But here we were.

The grape arbor was the portal through which summer vacations began.

There, under dappled sunlight and glowing shade, Grandma would bring out a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and cool drinks in blue glasses frosted with ice.

There, we could savor the chill of the black metal chairs pressing diamond patterns into our legs—legs so relieved to be quit of sweaty plush and cracker crumbs.


There we could watch birds darting to and fro across the sun-drenched lawn, alighting on the edge of Grandma’s scalloped birdbath, dipping their beaks with eager ferocity, clinging to the birdbath with toes spread wide, observing the intruders with ardent, alert eyes.

There we could hear the wind chimes’ clamoring, calming, waxing, waning, whispering, wavering welcome calling us deeper in.

At the end of the long corridor of grape vines stood a rabbit hutch housing a quiet, well-fed rabbit who was partial to solitude and not fond of children. On the other, a burbling fountain pouring into a small goldfish pond where the fish glided noiselessly through green water under cool lily pads and pink water lilies.

Behind the grape arbor, a shaded green lawn shyly offered up grass a little sparser and sparer than the thick, luxuriant grass of home, but delicious—springy and ticklish—under your feet. At the back of the yard, an old metal swing set with two swings, a slide, and monkey bars called out to be played with. We might if there was time, but usually the stories were already beginning.

When we were quiet enough, inobtrusive enough, to let the adults get started, Grandma and Grandpa would start to reminisce.

Grandpa would recall with pride purchasing a 1923 Grey when he was fourteen and driving it back home to the farm in South Dakota to surprise his family. “It’s still in the garage there now,” he’d jerk his thumb towards the garage behind the grape arbor. Even on tiptoes, I couldn’t peer into the lowest panes of the garage door windows. I believe I only actually saw it once, as an adult, but it was alive to me long before I saw it.

As I listened, I would study his snow-white hair and rounded belly, his energetic frame, his laughing eyes surrounded by a smattering of freckles and I’d try to picture that boy.
  

That was part of the magic of being at Grandma and Grandpa’s house—knowing there was more.

Every object, every person, every moment possessed layers of stories even if I didn’t know them all. I was captivated by this as I was by Russian nesting dolls. I loved never being sure how many layers, how many personalities and flavors there were to discover. I savored the delicious process of opening and unpacking, of revisiting the known and loved on the way to the new and intriguing, only to find that it too was only a shell on the way to a deeper, inner core. 

I was entranced by the magic of the garage that held a car, the grandpa who had been a boy, the grandma who was still in so many ways a little girl.


Grandma was dark and small, childlike in her joys and loves—animals, flowers, fairytales, dolls.


She connected deeply with animals. Her father had raised rabbits for meat, she would tell us as we lingered around the hutch under the grape arbor. She would shake her head and her voice would trail off as she relived this childhood pain. She always had a dog. I remember Elsa, the German shepherd, and later, Jenny, the black lab and then, of course, Hardee, the cat without a tail that she had found run over on the side of the road and nursed back to health.

Even though they had been married for many decades, Grandpa called her “my girlfriend” and often recounted how that blonde, freckled country boy had fallen for a dark-haired, olive-skinned city girl. He always chuckled that he’d hoped his children and grandchildren would take after her as he looked around in mock despair at the sea of pale, blonde grandchildren.

It was never clear if his jokes were at our expense or for our benefit. Probably both. He could be as tart as the new grapes, but his twinkling eyes and crooked smile belied all gall, and the memory is sweet on my tongue.