Grandma

Summer 1999

            She’s still here, on her father’s grave, where she wanted to be.  I picked up pieces of ash.  There were some big flakes, porous.  I wondered if this had been her hip bone… that, maybe a thigh, or a piece of skull.  I sifted through the fine ash with my fingers, letting the dust from it float in the slight breeze.  Grandma’s dust.  I breathed it in, amazed that the ashes were still here, a year and a half after we had spread them on this grave.  I had thought they would filter down through the soil, wash down with the rain, and mix with whatever remained there of her father’s body, my great-grandfather, who I never met.  I could have taken some of the flakes of ash, to keep part of Grandma with me.  But she would not have liked that.  She’d asked Dad to put her here, and she wouldn’t want parts of her taken away, to Chicago or to Egypt. 

“Lord have mercy,” she would have said.  “Don’t you go takin’ me half way across the earth when I’m gone.”

I wonder if she ever left the state of Maryland in her life; maybe for brief forays into Pennsylvania or Virginia or West Virginia, certainly no further.  The gravestone says

FOX

JESSE FOX

July 13, 1867 – June 2, 1949

_________

MARTHA L. HIS WIFE

June 24, 1872 – April 14, 1916

I glanced at the next tombstone, barely legible.

REUBEN                    ROBERT

Died Jun 29, 1919       Died April 11, 1919

Twin children of

Jesse B. – Martha L. Fox

            When were they born?  Grandma was twenty-one when her brothers died, three years after their mother.  Were they killed in World War I?  I don’t remember Grandma ever talking about them, and now I can’t ask her. 

            I rubbed a ring into Grandma’s ashes, to carry something of her essence…a silly gesture, since she is in me with the force of a thousand memories.   She loved me, even when I was a narcissistic young woman, and didn’t visit her enough.  Sitting by her ashes I felt her all around, approving even though she couldn’t have understood much of my life…. or maybe she could have in her own uncomplicated way, and I just never appreciated that.  I remember sitting in her kitchen when I was pregnant with Sara, she standing at the stove stirring milk into a pan of tomato soup. 

“What do you think of the name Nadia Grandma?”   I had spent months agonizing over names that would be easy for my family and my in-laws.

“Oh, I’d never remember that name,” she responded.  She brought the soup to the table with a plate of saltine crackers and looked at me.

“He’s a good man, your husband.  He must come from good people.”  

She couldn’t pronounce his name or fathom the place he came from, or the nature of his faith.  She just knew.

I found another marker, to the right of Jesse and Martha’s, a flattened stone in the ground.

RUTH M.

1898

What is this Grandma?  I wondered.  Did you have this stone put here?  Is this for you, Ruth Mercer, with the year of your birth?  Why didn’t you tell us?  Why didn’t we see it when we sprinkled your ashes? 

Who else could it be for?  We must add an inscription to the stone, I thought, with the year of her death, 1998.  She lived six months short of 100 years. 

The site is so beautiful, on a hill surrounded by rolling farmland, and the blue mountains to the west; a simple stone country church, “Mt Tabor Evangelical Lutheran.”  I went inside and found a plaque on the wall reading “100^th Anniversary – 1875-1975.”  Built ten years after the Civil War ravaged the land and families around here, when Jesse Fox, my great grandfather, was eight years old. 

The stained glass windows in the sanctuary were donated in memory of various people, by their families.  The names match those on the tombstones outside – Krise, Stambaugh, Barrick, Keilholtz, Hankey, Valentine, Long.  No Foxes though.  I doubt the Foxes ever had the money to donate a stained glass window.  They were subsistence farmers.  Alone in the sanctuary, I knelt on the floor and said a prayer in Arabic.  Grandma can understand it now.

            I drove from the cemetery in Rocky Ridge through farm fields to Woodsboro, where Dad was born and went to school, toward Frederick and Hood College, where my parents met.  Dad took care of the horses at the college stable.  Mom was one of the students.  His people had all been farmers.  She was from a business family in New England.  I looked toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.  My whole early history:  conception, birth, childhood, adolescence, all happened in view of these mountains.  I admired them, rising slowly from the haze as I drove toward them, farms turning into woods, until I was swallowed by trees and shadow. 

Every year, at least once, I fly into Baltimore or Washington from Chicago, rent a car and drive west, through Frederick and over the mountains to Hagerstown, where my parents settled after my birth.  These are old mountains, not awesome and breathtaking like the young chains in the west.  They’ve been worn and softened by geologic ages. 

As a child I used to have a dream, so vivid it felt real every time.  I would leave my body and fly in exhilarating freedom, out of my bedroom window, up over the mountains, above the peak at Black Rock, dip and then rise again with the land, looking down at the trees and streams, over the opening in the blanket of woods where water crashed down onto rocks at Cunningham Falls, to the edge of the forest where deer would graze with their fawns.  I would arrive at the place above Frederick and hover, knowing that Grandma was down there.  I always wanted to go further, but the dream ended there every time.  I never got beyond Frederick.