As you read this, Grandme is a memory, relationships have come and gone, children have left home. 

As you read this, only the feeling that existed in this time and place lives on, but it is proof that what people most remember about us is not what we did or said, but how we made them feel.  

Walnut leaves fall like golden rain this long-ago autumn as we make the 7 ½ hour drive to the southern mill town of Asheboro, North Carolina, to visit the children’s great-grandmother. We go to escape our daily schedules, to be spoiled with attention and shown off to neighbors, for in this world we are still children, though we have children of our own. We have been coming since we were in college, before we had made a family. Now, we make this trip on borrowed time. Grandme will be 88 in the spring. 

When we turn down the long, hilly road leading to Grandme’s brick house, it beckons from the top of the rise like a lantern in the twilight. Autumn is as gentle here as the retired millworkers and Sunday School teachers who reside in this tight-knit community. Even in the balmy November dusk, we can see blue morning glories, tightly closed, clinging to the lamppost as we pull the car into the drive and emerge stiff with travel. Pale yellow roses placed about the house in honor of our arrival greet us in the parlor. A single perfect bud bows from a slender vase on the linoleum kitchen table, where we gather to recount tales of the trip south while the children scamper about in search of “Boy.”

Boy is Grandme’s 17-year-old, black-as-carbon, cat. His formal name is Booger-Boy… a fact we conceal from the children because they would love it too much. No one knows why Boy is peculiar, but his intense paranoia is generally accepted as the infirmity of any aging relative. He jumps at the slightest sound, won’t be held, and spends an inordinate amount of time hiding in the basement, coming and going unobtrusively by a cat door.

A squeal, a thud, and running feet tell us there has been a sighting, and we relax, knowing the children will be occupied for a while.

Grandme stands at the kitchen counter pulling out Tupperware containers full of homemade baked goods of every kind. She stands very erect, and her grey hair is swept upward, adding several inches to her stature. Behind her, the paned window has been polished crystal clear, and on the pristine, white-painted sill, African violets bloom in pink profusion.

Grandme is the first to begin the ritual storytelling as we sample coconut cake, then a cherry pie. The entire town knows when Grandme’s “kids” are coming, and in southern tradition, they all pitch in to help with the food. Grandme lets us assume she has made all these delicacies, and we don’t ask for recipes. 

The week before our arrival, she begins, she came home from shopping, fed Boy, and began to sense another presence in the house. She called her next-door neighbor Lucy.

“Lucy?” she whispered. “Hey, honey, it’s me. Listen, I think there’s somebody in my house.”

The two women, neighbors for 60 years, who routinely scare each other with arrest accounts from the Courier-Tribune, armed themselves with kitchen utensils and began their search. 

Boy, slinking around with them, appeared under beds, in closets, and on clothes chests, his green eyes wild and gleaming when confronted by the flashlight. 

At last, the intruder was identified. An opossum, sound asleep under an upstairs sofa, had found the cat door convenient access to a good night’s rest. Boy, eyes bulging at the discovery, dissolved into the night like spilled ink. 

We laugh at the story and refill our coffee cups; thick, rounded porcelain mugs you’d find in a small-town diner. 

The children, exhausted, climb the stairs to bed and we adults settle down to gossip late into the night about all the aunts, sisters, brothers, and cousins not present. We can do this, of course, because we are family, and it is assumed we love each other unconditionally, if imperfectly. So, we gasp over Marcia’s affair, shake our heads woefully at Uncle Joe’s beer consumption, and discuss with genuine interest distant relations we will never meet. 

Although these are not my blood relatives, they are my children’s, and by association, I can gasp and gossip with the rest of them. After all, we are a clan, kinfolk, a tribe. With that thought, I glance around at the photographs on the TV, the scrawled cards from the great-grandchildren on the refrigerator, and know that we each make this trip for a different reason, take home a different experience.

The children are compiling memories of a great-grandmother they will not always have. Their father is fondly reliving summer memories of his youth, and I am being healed. 

My own family had little of this comfortable unity. My mother retained custody of my two older sisters and me, but we were no longer a family of five. We were Virginia and the girls. Divorce took more than a parent; it took our familyness, 

When love has gone haywire in the past, it becomes even more important to create families of our own–a place where we can satisfy our innate need to belong to someone. That acceptance, wherever we can find it, is the healing and magnification of the human heart. It is through this experience in my own life that I have come to recognize a larger and larger group as family. 

Even now, when a writer whose manuscript I’m working on complains about the state of publishing today, I nod with split attention, remembering that tonight, my family is going to enjoy homemade vegetable soup with crusty herb bread and Irish butter by the fire. Joy that is pure and simple gratitude wells up and spills over. I am spirit-rich. I am generous. I feel a connection to people I have not met, and I know it is real, though it is beyond my understanding. My family becomes the family of man, including this writer and his anxieties. 

It is late when we rise to wash our coffee cups at the porcelain sink. The darkness outside has turned the kitchen window into a mirror, and our reflections break and mingle in the small panes.

We call the cat inside softly and prepare for bed. By midnight, the house is finally silent, and we whisper our goodnights to Grandme from the quilted four-poster bed in the guestroom. 

But I am not a guest. Nor are you. We are simply family that has yet to meet.

Happy Thanksgiving, beloveds. Happy Thanksgiving. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

I’m walking across my college campus, mahogany leaves crunching beneath my feet, just as they did the year I arrived as an Eventual-English major.  

I climb the steep steps of William Smith Hall to sit in the same classroom where I studied American Lit in order to learn about “The Hard Problem of Consciousness” from Jeff, a fellow alumnus. Spoiler Alert: no one knows how to distinguish mind from brain or how life first became self-aware. No one knows how it was that millions and millions of years ago, some microbial cell in the primordial soup woke up and announced, “Eureka! 

“I see me!”

What if, I wonder as I glance out the centuries-old, massive windows of my classroom, one of us, one day, makes a similar leap in consciousness and announces, “Eureka! I’m love made manifest.” Because of course, we are.

I see you. 

Chairs scrape on hardwood floors as I wave goodbye to Jeff but rising to leave, I see the freshman co-ed I was rushing down the worn varnished steps of Smith Hall to my work-study job on High Street. 

I had been hired as a companion to an elderly widow named Mrs. Molloy. She employed a housekeeper but wanted a nice young girl from the college to accompany her on afternoon walks along the tree-lined streets of Chestertown. That nice young girl was me. 

She might have done better. 

Mrs. Molloy wore her silver hair up in a twist, and her home was only a block from the shallow banks of the sparkling Chester River. I thought of her as wealthy because she had traveled all over the world, though I had no means of comparison. She dictated letters for me to write, and then we bundled up and negotiated her steep front steps for our daily walk, she leaning heavily on my arm, and me trying to support the weight of fragile cargo three times my age but about my size. As we inched past art galleries and bakeries, I realized pretty quickly that my actual role was that of a storyteller.

So, I told her about the boy from Chapel Hill I had fallen in love with while working on Cape Cod for the summer, and about a Midshipman from the Naval Academy I’d gone out with a few times, before heading to the Cape. I told her about the letters my very Southern boyfriend wrote from his frat house at UNC, and how I was looking forward to him coming up to Maryland for Thanksgiving.

Weirdly, Mrs. Molloy followed each Chapel Hill update with a complete non sequitur: “And what about that Midshipman?” Maybe she was wise enough to know my long-distance relationship was going to be a challenge, but her strange loyalty, her advocacy for this other boy I barely knew, made me wonder if she was a fan of the Armed Forces or knew something I didn’t know. So, on the day I shared that without warning, Chapel Hill had broken my heart, her response was predictable and practical: “And what about that Midshipman?”

 For the first time, I took her advice and invited the Midshipman to Thanksgiving instead of the Confederate, and the rest of that story is three children. 

One spring afternoon, Mrs. Molloy and I were in her study—rust-and-blue oriental carpet, hardcover books to the ceiling, organdy curtains softly obscuring a bay window—she sitting on the overstuffed sofa, me in her desk chair–and she lit up a cigarette. She usually smoked in the garden, but on this day, as I watched, she tried to light the wrong end, then ignited it somewhere in the middle, stuck it between her lips, and continued our conversation with the smoldering cigarette bobbing about. This was odd, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know how. It was her house, she was my employer, and above all, I didn’t want to embarrass her. 

But as I watched, she started listing to the side, slowly, like she was kind of melting. Like she was a tree, felled by the last blow of the ax. Yet she kept talking and smoking as if everything was normal. 

As a child, I had learned to normalize everything—if there was an elephant in the room, I’d explain how that might not be so odd: circus in town, exotic pet on the loose! So, as she listed, I leaned, and just kept talking, covering for her, until, still acting as if everything was routine, she lay completely horizontal on the couch.

The word ‘stroke’ never crossed my mind. It was simply beyond my range of experience, and she seemed fine in every other way. I must have gotten the housekeeper for help, though I don’t remember. I may have just propped her back up like a Webble. 

I usually worked on Thursday afternoons, but that Monday in Seventeenth Century Literature, Professor James, who also lived in town, pulled me aside to tell me Mrs. Molloy was dead. I didn’t cry. I normalized the news. 

I think I had a Cinderella fantasy: that this woman with no children had cared for me, and that, knowing I was only in college by the grace of multiple scholarships, she might possibly leave me some financial help to further my education. That’s what I mean by she could have done better than a girl whose affection was corrupted by hope. She did leave the college $10,000.

She left me a begonia. 

Why am I telling you this, and why am I telling you now? Because I’m back on campus in the same room where I was so naive, I didn’t know how to say, Wait, what??? And I’m learning about consciousness even as I have to acknowledge that I have gone through my life pretty unconscious. Blundering along. And for that, I just can’t stop being sorry. 

Sorry.

I set my begonia on the sunny window ledge of my room in Minta Martin Hall and loved it in Mrs. Molloy’s honor for several years. And I’m still trying to separate out whether I can be sorry enough for the mistakes that I’ve made to absolve them, or whether that’s what the fuss is all about. 

Absolution is not required.

You did the best you could. “A” for effort, beloved classmates. And maybe the best that you could do was always the goal on your cosmic syllabus. You didn’t fail; you fulfilled.  

I read this prayer years ago, and perhaps it’s how consciousness came into the world –that moment when life became aware of itself for the first time, a blank slate of pure potential. 

Maybe that first cell woke up and said: “I’m alive!” And then with all the hope of you and me in its nascent awareness added–

“God, help me accept the truth about myself.

 “No matter how beautiful it is.” 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

It was supposed to last a hundred years. The trust set up to protect Eagle Hill was to keep the woodland along the Magothy River safe from developers, but the last of the family who owned the property has died. Its future is unknown. 

The developers who would subdivide this legacy have very different aspirations from those my midwestern parents brought to Maryland more than half a century ago. All they wanted was an old house along a river in which to raise their three daughters. What they could afford was Barnstead, an abandoned stable overlooking the river, which they began remodeling into our family home the year I turned three. 

Time was told by season at Barnstead. In winter, migrating swans crowded the icy cove with their snowy grace, stark December’s only vain accessory. In summer, thunderstorms billowed across the open water like undulating curtains. Each raindrop, if you watched from the pier, displaced a small crown of water as it met the river, but there was no royalty here. Education had allowed my parents to exceed the usual limitations of their rural childhoods, but my father was still a carpenter’s son, and my mother, a farmer’s daughter.  

Together they built a home where my mother would write books and my father would boat, but the sparkling surface of the Magothy obscured unanticipated depths, and the sandy bottom could disappear without warning beneath small bare feet. My sisters and I would learn that sometimes we are parented by a place as much as by those responsible for us, and that dreams, though a less obvious inheritance than the color of our eyes, are also part of our parents’ legacy; both yours, I suspect, and mine.

On my last trip back to Eagle Hill, a 30-minute drive from the town where I live now, I think it is ironic that my kids, who grew up in a world of private schools and yacht clubs, would approach with caution the people who inhabited Eagle Hill.

Mr. Prince and his numerous preschool children rented an old house near the Barn. We seldom saw the Princes, but every so often, Mr. Prince would arrive on our doorstep for a visit. Smoking a pipe, he’d sit on the early American loveseat Mom had slipcovered, while several small muslin bags, tied through his belt loops, twitched and roiled.  

Mother served iced tea, and I kept a vigilant eye on those bags, knowing each contained one, if not several, snakes. I thought Mr. Prince was unbearably weird, but my father, if he were alive today, would laugh and assure me he was harmless. Dad was naturally generous and slow to pass judgment. I can’t imagine what they talked about, the snake collector and the hospital administrator, but a kind of midwestern hospitality was at work: no one is turned away from the door, even a man wearing snakes. 

A gregarious ladies’ man, my father had a story for every occasion, but I had learned not to always trust his claims. I doubt, for instance, that the pirate Blackbeard once slipped up the Chesapeake as far as the Magothy, but Dad said angry settlers had ambushed the pirate where he had moored in Black Hole Creek. During the most intense part of the battle, Blackbeard and his first mate managed to row ashore with a treasure chest. They walked for 15 minutes, then buried it, returned to the ship, and set sail. So somewhere near Barnstead lay a pirate’s chest of gold, Dad said. But in which direction did they walk? And how fast can two grown men walk carrying a heavy burden between them? As my father began taking longer and longer overnight business trips, I spent an increasing amount of time searching for treasure I thought would save us.

In my father’s absence and my mother’s increasing distraction, I found comfort in practicing self-sufficiency. I rearranged the furniture in my bedroom to resemble a living room. A small table in the center displayed a candy dish for visitors. I liked the idea that I could live on the apples in the orchard, walnuts and mulberries, even the bitter persimmons, and wild plums. I could crab and fish. Barnstead allowed me to believe I could take care of myself. It would never be necessary, of course, but there was a sense of security in the exercise. 

For all the tension around me as my parents’ distance grew, I never feared I’d be abandoned, as children often do. Instead, I worried that we would somehow lose Barnstead. I’d overhear my parents talking about developers and zoning laws, and I feared the woods would be lost to tract housing. I even began to worry that a tidal wave could appear at the mouth of the Magothy to sweep away my world. 

I prepared for a natural disaster because I didn’t know there were other kinds. My anxiety was well-founded. I had simply attached it to the wrong loss. 

As my parents’ dream of a river house full of children neared completion, so did their marriage. After a decade of sheltering my family, an ad was run, and Banstead was sold to the first person who walked in the door. 

My affection for Barnstead remains the intense attachment of a child, though I am a woman now. It was the only home in which I had two parents–a family. As I pass the entrance to our lane this afternoon, the house has been swallowed from view by the trees, but I heard it was torn down decades ago, replaced by a McMansion I do not want to see. 

I am a trespasser here. 

Whatever there was of value, I have taken with me–an appreciation for beauty, for labors of the heart, an unwillingness to pass judgment on their outcome. Now I am the mother who raised three children in the company of a river. Now, I write the books. 

Where do you carry the past? That’s not rhetorical, I’m really asking. What part of you is you because of where you’ve been?

My youngest, who lives in DC, is coming home for the weekend. I remember the night, years ago, when I went upstairs to check on her after the babysitter left. She was sound asleep in the twin Jenny Lind bed that had been mine as a child, the book she’d been reading, fallen to the floor. Kneeling to retrieve it, I lifted the white eyelet dust ruffle and noticed that the slats supporting the mattress were unusually narrow. 

Raising the fabric further, I realized for the first time that the slats were the rough, white battens that vertically sided the Barn when we found it, eventually replaced by cedar shingles, but saved and put to good use. 

Dropping the dust ruffle, I rose and walked out, leaving the legacy of Barnstead beneath new and tender dreams.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

I was in my doctor’s office the other day thinking about some lies I was told as a kid…

1. This is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you.
2. No one is going to laugh.
3. You probably won’t need a shot.

I was going to receive a couple of injections, pleased that one of the advantages of being a grownup is that what used to be truly terrifying is no longer scary, like going to the dentist (drills) and going to the doctor (shots). 

 (Of course, the number one fear most people suffer, I still suffer as well: A fear greater than death, which is #4, or mutilation, which is #3, or divorce, #2. The most common fear greater than death? Public speaking.)

I did wonder, however, if it’s not that I’ve matured but that shots have gotten better, because I’m pretty sure when I was a kid, the needle was the size of a turkey baster, and the injection was not in my arm…  

So, I was taken back to a cubicle before I could even be seated in the waiting room, which is a bait-and-switch kind of move. You think you’re being seen right on time, but you’re really being removed from the interesting but jeopardizing melee of feverish coughers to cool your heels alone in an exam room. 

I got up on the table with the crinkly paper and eyed the same pictures on the wall that I’ve seen on previous visits—the blue-footed booby, the tortoise, and the gull…the chart on the back of the door where I could compute my body mass index. Time clicked on.  

I got out my phone and started emailing, having looked through all the drawers last time. Half an hour went by. I’m pretty punctual, so I admit I was getting a bit annoyed, but my doctor is retiring, and I didn’t want to be mad at her the last time we were going to see each other in this life. This was challenging, however, because I had seen her sitting in the room next door, eating a Caesar salad and yukking it up with a coworker when I was led to my cubicle, and I could still hear her socializing through the wall. Sometimes when this happens, I get up and open the door, so they can see me still sitting in there, a perky, punctual cuckoo in a clock. 

After a while, an apologetic nurse came in and said, “Let’s just go ahead and give you your flu shot and your COVID booster.”

“Sure,” I said, rolling up my sleeves with grown-up bravado. Have at it, sister! She pointedly closed the door upon leaving. 

When the door finally reopened, my doctor looked at me a little guiltily, but I did not complain. I am exceptional at not crying over spilled milk. I smiled hello, she sat down, and we chatted about our lives, though in reality, I barely know her.

She was installing a new birdfeeder, and I told her I used to wake to a cacophony of birdsong, but dawn comes silently now. Curious as to why, I looked it up. Turns out it was not my imagination. There is a virus sweeping through Maryland bird populations, and the State has asked that we stop using feeders (birds are polite but don’t need them). I noted I also haven’t seen the annual migration of yellow finches this fall, and that’s when we started talking about what will happen to us when we die. 

Sorry. She started it. 

I don’t have any health issues, so I don’t know why she suddenly said, “I think, when your time is up, it’s up.”

 (Oh my gosh…maybe she was talking about retirement!)

“Why do you think that?” I asked, intrigued and assuming otherwise. 

“I started thinking that when the Twin Towers fell,” she explained. “Too many people were on those planes who should not have been— unexpected changes to plans– and too many people were not on those flights who should have been—overslept, traffic jams.” 

I used to think that way as well for much the same reason, I told her. People survive the impossible and die from the improbable. But I don’t know anymore. I can make a case both ways. And as Stephan Hawking said, “I have noticed that even people who say they believe everything is predestined, look both ways before crossing the road.”  We laughed at that.

Suddenly she said, “I’m having a party. You should come.” And as we chatted, she wrote down an address and stuck the paper in my purse.

It’s at a church nearby, and although I won’t know a soul in attendance, I’m going. Alone, of course. It will be a little uncomfortable, and being alone makes it more so, but I’ve noticed that magic happens when you embrace the thing that most scares you. 

As long as it’s not a toast. That’s a fear worse than death. But I’ll think of you when I raise my glass and say, Cheers! I’m so glad I could come.

Because your best stories have not even begun. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.