At Mimi and Pa’s house, an overstuffed cat sits in the empty Sweet Louisiana Strawberries box, a relic from an earlier pilgrimage to the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival. The floor-to-ceiling window facing the west provides warmth and amusement for the fat bastard, who weighs (at last check) forty-one pounds and change. This cat has, for the time being, won the battle – the other cat being too slow in getting to the box, is now curled up on the dog bed. Gato Numero Dos (no slouch himself, inordinately hefty at thirty-three pounds) anxiously waits and watches. As soon as the first cat moves from the box, the box will become his domain once again. The first cat (who becomes the loser) will pitifully shuffle his enormous girth, covering the seventeen feet in about eighteen seconds, over to the bed that was purchased for the Labrador Retriever, but which has since been commandeered by the feline duo, much to the dog’s chagrin. The dog, in fact, seems to have ceded the territory in lieu of combat, having negotiated an armistice of sorts: she never goes near the Sweet Louisiana Strawberries box or the bed, and in exchange for this, the cats refrain from clawing the dog’s face to ribbons. It seems that all parties are satisfied with this arrangement, especially seeing that the dog spends half the day lying on the tile floor of the den sharing the same sunlight being enjoyed by the winning cat, just several feet away. They eat from the table, and are treated better than most children. Their laughable weights (the dog is pushing a hundred pounds) are a function of their diet: they get a bowl of cat or dog food (which is more than enough for the day), and when the people eat, they get a bowl of whatever is left over. And since this is an old-school south Mississippi household, that usually includes bacon or ham hocks or fatback or some other pork product high in saturated fats and cholesterol. Their lifespans are shortened precipitously by this, which is to say that they live short, but happy, lives.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, the back door is never locked. They figure that if you feel comfortable walking into their house, you’re probably not a threat to them, at least not with the thirty-nine firearms in the house. They don’t have a perimeter fence – just a chain-link enclosure to keep the dogs from running loose. The flatbed trailer and the boat trailer (with the custom aluminum fishing boat and trolling and outboard motors) don’t have locks holding their couplers and levers closed to prevent theft. They figure if you’re brazen enough to drive a truck around their house and hook up their trailer, you’re probably family, a friend, or bad news. Either way, they’re not concerned about it. The back door is heavy and wooden, but the screen door is lighter. It’s old and creaky, so if you’re sitting inside, the first sign that someone’s coming in is the loud whine and groan of the ancient spring that keeps the screen door closed. And when the inner door is opened, it creaks and squeaks, and before it is closed again, you’re sure to hear the SLAM of the screen door against the doorjamb. I should mention that the floor-to-ceiling windows the cats monitor so zealously are right next to the back door. When the screen door slams shut, the loud crack is usually enough to cause a changing of the guard, so to speak. The cat in the box is spooked enough to get up and run – no, waddle - away from the noise, at which point the other cat makes his run for glory.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, it smells like cigarette smoke and pork fat. They’ve been smoking inside this house for the better part of a century now. It’s baked into the walls and ceilings and would take a lifetime and a fortune to eliminate. No matter – the house is going to someone who smokes when they’re gone. There’s always a small aluminum coffee kettle (you know the old kind with the spout that you’d sit directly on the stove to heat up) filled with bacon grease. Whenever Mimi gets to cooking anything in her aged (“ay-jed”) cast-iron skillet, she pulls the top off the coffee kettle and spoons up a little of that grease. The butter is usually left out on the counter, too. Mimi doesn’t want to have to wait for it to soften when she wants softened butter, and she’s got some in the freezer for when she needs cold butter to make biscuits. Besides, she hasn’t gotten sick from it before, and doesn’t know anyone who has, and Pa is a doctor any damn way, so she’s just fine with it, thank you very much. There’s almost always a sizzle or a simmer, barely audible from the den. And when you walk in, Pa greets you warmly and yells, “Jane, bring [whatever your name is] some of that [whatever delightful little morsel they have lying around for just such an occasion].” She waits a second, contorts her face in confusion, and yells back, “What?” Neither of them flinch in this odd game of verbal chicken. No clarification is made. And yet, shortly thereafter, Mimi is handing you a small plate with a piece of hickory-nut cake, or bowtie cookies, or huckleberry cobbler. This happens even, and especially, when you tell them you’re not hungry or don’t want anything, thanks. At Mimi and Pa’s house, laughter isn’t the best medicine. Food is. What’s that you say? You have a headache? Eat something. Your stomach hurts and your back aches? Eat something. You were in a car wreck and broke both of your legs? Eat something. You have lupus? Eat something. Amazingly, it works.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, the invisible hand of the free market is always at work. Pa always has two things for you: something to eat, and something to do. You have to earn your keep. Sometimes, that means pulling the limbs that fell last night in the big storm out to the street. But sometimes, that means taking him for a drive out in the country so that he can get out of the house and smell fresh air and forget for thirty measly minutes that his body is failing him faster than his mind is. No request for a favor is ever refused, although there may be some restrictions or negotiated recompense for the use of the trailer/four-wheeler/whatever. Even when Pa won’t let you take the trailer to haul furniture for your girlfriend’s apartment move, if you ask for the trailer, he’ll pay for a U-Haul.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, there’s this white couch. It’s mystical and glorious, almost luminescent. It sits in the living room, covered and untouched, 364 days a year. The living room and dining room are adjacent and have no partition or wall separating them, but even when we have Thanksgiving or Easter dinner in the dining room and we have to set up the kids’ table in the living room, that couch is undisturbed. Woe be unto the ignorant child who dares touch that damn white couch. The only time the couch is uncovered is on Christmas morning, when Mimi and Pa (and nobody else, dammit) sit on the couch and paw at opening their presents, which are the same as they were last year, and the year before that, because they’re old and the family just doesn’t seem to put much thought into their gifts anymore. They’re grateful just the same. Pa likes Jelly Belly jelly beans. Mimi usually gets a sweater or housecoat or some other warm garment. The real magic is in their eyes watching their grandchildren open up their gifts, and in watching their children’s eyes light up watching their own kids. After about an hour and a half, Pa’s getting a little restless, so he makes his way back down to the den to watch a football game until the meal is ready. Mimi has been cooking for two days already, and the housekeeper, a kind but stern Black lady whose first name is Nita and whose last name escapes me (she always been known affectionately as “Mama Nita” to the grandkids), has been working hard to polish the silver and make sure the china is out. Mimi and Pa first hired her when she would have been known as “The Help,” but that term has for obvious reasons fallen out of favor and practice. Mama Nita has more authority, as perceived by the grandkids at least, than any aunt or uncle. The grandkids are more afraid of drawing Mama Nita’s ire than their parents’. She helps to raise three little boys (my brother, my cousin, and me), in addition to the other family she works for, and her own kids and grandkids. Mama Nita brooks no disrespect, and poor manners exhibited by anyone – and I mean anyone – and toward anyone is met with swift and decisive corrective action.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, my cousin, my brother, and I play football in the front yard. The whole property is a one-acre square with the house slightly closer to the road in front of the house than it is to the back line of the property. Front Yard Field is marked by a couple of live oaks next to the driveway that runs up the south side of the property, set about twenty yards apart and roughly parallel to the driveway. The one closer to the house has a limb that came out perpendicular to the trunk about five feet off the ground, which is incredibly convenient for those inclined to climb, but the one closer to the street has thick, gnarling trunks that curve down low enough to climb up on and from there make it very easy to climb. These two trees mark the goal line of the south endzone. Toward the north end, it’s a little more dicey. There is a dwarf magnolia tree just outside the west hashmark about the notional ten-yard-line which, depending on your perspective, serves either as an excellent blocker or an excuse to accuse the others of cheating. The north endzone is likewise less than ideal: there is one big pine tree, and a sweet gum that we have conscripted into our service. The problems are twofold: one, they are not even roughly parallel to the driveway or perpendicular to the field of play, nor are they spaced the same or a similar distance apart as the live oaks; and two, every year when fall comes, the sweet gum drops all the spent seed pods (“gumballs”) and they present a slipping hazard. Even if you don’t slip on them (when it gets really bad it’s like running on marbles), if you fall or get tackled to the ground and land on them, you are sure to have great big round bruises where the balls had left their marks. When we can’t find a fourth, my cousin selflessly performs the duties of all-time quarterback and switches sides between my team and my brother’s team. He only gets to be the all-time quarterback (a very coveted position in yard football) because he is the oldest. I suspect he plays better when he is on the other team.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, getting up early means already having had your first cup of coffee by 5:00am. If we’re going dove hunting – the first hunting of the year as we think of it, in August or early September – it means dragging sleepy kids out of bed around 4:15am, waking them up just enough to get dressed in their camouflage, and heading over to Mimi and Pa’s house about 4:45am. While the kids doze on the couch (not the white one), the grownups drink cup after cup after cup of strong coffee, black. When it’s time to go, we are rousted from our slumber and ushered out to the carport, where we find Pa’s late-1980s Ford Bronco. It is an odd vehicle for a respected physician to drive, but it was perfect for him and for us. He never feels it necessary to wash it, because it is just going to get muddy again. In fact, the smell of the interior is kind of musty and smells like soil, we assumed from old dirt and mud ground into the carpet and upholstery. We pile into the Bronco, and perhaps another vehicle as well, depending on who all was going, and off we go – for about 0.2 miles. We have to stop at this Shell station, known locally as the Cracker Barrel. The restaurant chain of the same name came along and sued the owner of the station because of the name, and the Shell station won because it had been open and known as the Cracker Barrel for longer than the restaurant chain had been in existence, much less sufficiently well-known to justify sending out cease-and-desist threats to everybody who sounded like them. We have to go to the Cracker Barrel because you can get a quart of hot, fresh, non-terrible coffee for a dime, and the kids get a fresh sausage dog (breakfast of champions) and a pint of chocolate milk for breakfast. My dad usually picks up a newspaper, which he would read later that day, even though one would be delivered to both Mimi and Pa’s house and his own.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, breakfast is a big deal. Eggs, bacon, ham, sausage, pancakes, toast, grits, biscuits, jellies and jams, coffee, milk, orange juice, and every now and then some fruit. Everything is cooked with butter or bacon grease, and sometimes both. We come back from the hunt, and it is waiting for us on the table. Of course Mimi had been cooking since we left, but that doesn’t mean she stops when we get there. I swear she hasn’t eaten a hot, home-cooked meal since the 1950s. While we gorge ourselves on every pork product imaginable and carbs upon carbs upon carbs, she flits about, quick and unobtrusive, refilling coffee, bringing out more when we run low on something, and generally making sure everyone eats well. And she makes it harder on herself than necessary – she doesn’t make full-sized pancakes, but small ones. Not quite silver dollar pancakes, but between those and regular pancakes. This means that she has to cook twice as many pancakes, when she could just make them larger. But we really like small pancakes, so she always makes them, diligently, one by one in her magic castiron skillet with the orange paint on the handle. Nobody knows why there’s orange paint on the handle.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, you can hear Pa’s voice, his rich baritone, telling stories and jokes. Although his heritage is more Germanic than Gaelic, he seems to carry on the great Irish storytelling tradition. As he talks, he always takes a drag from his cigarette at the same points in the stories, because that is the best time to draw out a pause. Ever the entertainer, Pa has a joke or a story about anything and everything, most of them about growing up dirt-poor and splitting his time between the backwoods of south Mississippi and Detroit. He has family who had worked in the auto industry in the 1930s and 1940s (and the 1950s, the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s, come to think of it) and his parents would take him (he was an only child) to Detroit for long periods of time. He had served as a lab technician in the Air Force during the Korean Conflict, before he got his GI Bill (thanks, Sonny Montgomery) and went to medical school. He has hunting stories. He has fishing stories. Boy, does he have hunting and fishing stories. He’s got stories about when he played football for his high school team that only had twelve kids on the whole team. He’s got stories about his time in the service and stories about the early days of his and Mimi’s marriage. She very nearly refused to go on a second date with him, the first having been a blind date and not a good one at that. He doesn’t elaborate. She rejected his first proposal, but in the end she relented, much to the surprise of her poor mother, who first learned of Pa’s existence when Mimi told her that they were getting married. And no, she wasn’t pregnant. He has stories about traveling to Alberta and Acapulco, and about his friends in the antiques business in New Orleans. He can regale you with tales of the drama that unexpectedly arises in the Doc- tors’ Lounge at the local hospital. He relishes this sort of one-sided conversation. This is his element.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, family friends and colleagues trickle by after every successful hunting or fishing trip. I don’t understand why, except that they always seem to leave with some of the fish, or some of the deer meat, or some of the corn we’d gotten up at 4:00am to go pick in the heat and humidity of Copiah County August. They never leave empty-handed. I think they’re just moochers, until I witness the precipitating event for their arrival. When we return, everyone but Pa starts unloading the truck and getting ready to clean the fish, or break down the venison, or whatever the task is. Pa immediately figures out how much we have of whatever it is that we had gotten. He gives away about half of it. But his first action is to talk to Mimi and see who needs some meat or some vegetables, or who they hadn’t called the time before, or who they know who really likes whatever it is. Sometimes, he calls them. Other times, Mimi does. The next thing I know, they show up with an empty ice chest and leave with a full one. The phone in their house is always ringing, some friend or relative calling to catch up or talk about the weather, the upcoming hunting season, or whether the Rebels oughta fire that jackass running the football program. The only things Pa loves more than telling stories are Mimi, hunting and fishing, and being generous, in that order.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, I can hear Pa yelling from his easy chair in the den downstairs that we need to quit running down the hall upstairs and making a racket. I can feel the cobalt blue carpet fibers that are just a little too long to be like normal carpet, but not long enough to be shag. Rough and coarse, I can feel them cutting into my knees when I sit on the floor in the upstairs TV room because there is only one chair and I hadn’t been the fastest in the Hallway Grand Prix. The three of us play video games, two players at a time – winner stays, loser sits out the next game. We’re talking about the classics: Tecmo Bowl, Madden ’96, Mortal Kombat. We play these games on an old black and white TV that doesn’t have a remote. You have to change the channel by rotating these big knobs, and when you move from one station to another, the knobs made a loud kerchunk. Every so often, the picture goes all screwy, and whoever isn’t playing at the time is tasked with going up to it on the right side, and with a closed fist, hitting the side of the TV about two inches from the front and four inches from the top, à la Fonzie, and it goes right back to how it had been. Eventually, that old Zenith TV finally kerchunks its last kerchunk, and is replaced with a newer, color model. The colors are nice, because we finally don’t feel like we are stuck in the Stone Age. It isn’t the same, though.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, the outdoor freezers are like a mix between Doctor Who’s TARDIS, a time capsule, and your favorite restaurant. Mimi and Pa have a freezer-refrigerator combo in the kitchen, but they don’t really keep the goodies in there. That freezer is for butter and juice concentrate mainly. But outside, oh boy. They have an upright freezer on the side porch near the dining room and kitchen. They have two upright freezers (and two additional freezer-refrigerator combos) in the storage rooms built onto the back of the carport. All of them are constantly filled to the brim with every kind of food imaginable to a kid in south Mississippi. Fish we had caught. Deer we had killed. Corn we had picked. Pecans we had dug our cold little fingers into the moist dirt for in the winter and shelled. Blackberries that somehow survived the twenty-five minute drive back to the house from the dairy farm where we had cut our hands and arms to shreds on the briars for those fat, sweet, tart juice explosions that stained everything a deep burgundy and gave us a bellyache by the time we got back home. It seems like every time you take something out of the freezer, it is immediately replaced by something just as good. And in those storage rooms behind the carport, there are also some baker’s racks and modular shelving that hold jar upon jar upon jar of jellies, jams, preserves, conserves, pickles of every sort, “canned” vegetables (the kind you “can” at home in mason jars, not the kind you buy in a can from the supermarket), and the list goes on. And every time any of the grandkids comes home from college, they are instructed to bring an empty ice chest and take some of the stuff from the freezer with them. My brother and I live together while I’m in law school and he’s in undergraduate, and we survive on venison and wild boar roasts for a while, courtesy of the freezers.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, Mimi’s mind is starting to go. Her body isn’t doing so great either, but her faculties are slipping. She repeats herself, forgets where she put things, calls people by the wrong name. Not new acquaintances, but friends she’s known for decades, children and grandchildren. It is cruel to see how it plays out: Pa’s mind is as sharp as it ever was, while his body is sputtering and lurching through its final furlong; Mimi’s body holds strong as she slips into senility. All of this occurs simultaneously – these two people who have been each other’s everything for close to seven decades are each dying in their own way, unable to help the other while seeing it happening before their very eyes. Before it gets too bad, Pa tells stories (as always), and even though we know he remembers, he asks her who it was that fixed them up on their blind date, or in which little town they lived after they left Savannah. He is trying to jog her mind, to give her a little cognitive exercise, to keep her as sharp as possible for as long as possible. He knows he doesn’t have a lot of time left, and he wants to spend it with his bride, but he doesn’t want her to slip away, even as he does. Mimi, on the other hand, knows that Pa is dying, but she forgets every now and then and asks why he is in the downstairs “toy room” – that’s where his in-home hospital bed is. They have to move it there so he could be ferried to the bathroom and the den easily. She is upset and morose about Pa’s condition, but often doesn’t seem to understand why she is sad. She sits in her rocking chair, which hasn’t moved in about thirty years (approximately four feet west of Pa’s easy chair in the den), smokes a cigarette, watches a game show with the volume way too loud, and sheds a tear, which she immediately wipes away. On her most lucid days, Mimi knows what is about to happen. On her best days, she doesn’t. Ironically, when she is at her most senile, she is at her happiest. Pa is still same old Pa in her mind.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, the air is thick with confusion. Pa stops breathing in his sleep and passes away around 11:00pm. We come over (my parents live next door to Mimi and Pa’s house) and sit in numbed silence. We cry some, we stare at the walls some, we make inane small-talk about college football some. The hospice nurse, who has been there about twelve hours a day for the past two years, sobs into the phone, telling the other hospice nurse that Pa is dead. We don’t know whether to be devastated that he is gone, or relieved that he isn’t suffering anymore. We don’t know how Mimi will respond – the decision is made not to wake her until the morning. Would she be relieved as well? She has seen his condition steadily decline over the past few years, and she knows he was in pain. He had been waiting for death to come for him. Hell, he was at that point almost twenty years post-bypass. To clarify, he had seven (!) bypasses in one surgery, at the age of 67 (!), and had been smoking like a chimney for 70-plus years, didn’t know what green vegetables tasted like without pork fat and sugar, and had gotten 80% of his caloric intake in the form of red meat and fried food. He had smoked more and more frequently of late, though. Will she understand that he is really gone, like, for good? Will she be able to comprehend that she will never hear her husband’s voice again? If not, how will she navigate the rest of her life? After all, he was all she had known for almost 65 years. How will she make it through the day without him, not knowing why he isn’t there anymore? But if she did understand, how could she bear to keep going?
At Mimi and Pa’s house, everyone is scared to sit in Pa’s chair. Before, it was seen as the best spot in the den, and as long as he wasn’t in the den, it was fair game. But now, sitting in his chair feels crass. No one wants to go through his things. No one wants to talk about it. It’s bizarre – an extended family, brought together by an event that nobody will discuss, which looks a great deal like a bunch of people who have been summoned to a dinner party by an unknown host and for an unknown purpose. Cousins are on their phones. Aunts and uncles are discussing the election. Every now and then, someone goes to check on Mimi. Slowly, people disperse. Some have to go back to school. Others, back to work. Still others, back to their far-flung homes. But Mimi doesn’t have anywhere to go. She stays in the house she and Pa built in the 1960s, in which they raised four children: one a trauma surgeon, one a respected attorney, and two who were successful nurses. She sleeps in the bed she shared with her husband of just-shy-of-65 years, only he’s not there anymore when she reaches for him, and hasn’t slept in that bed in a long, long time. She gets up every morning and goes downstairs to the kitchen where she cooked a seemingly infinite array of delicious food, all to make Pa happy, but he isn’t there to pour a cup of coffee and eat his toast and eggs. She eats her breakfast at the same table where Pa sat (at the end, back to the wall) and held court after many a meal, but his voice is a ghost. She goes down into the den and sits in her rocking chair and looks over at the chair (both proverbial and Platonic) where Pa had sat for 50 years and told stories, shelled pecans, hulled peas, drank coffee, watched the Braves win and lose, and doted on his grandkids. He isn’t there anymore. His chair is empty. She walks her empty house, the shell of a life she built with a man who now no longer breathes. Five bedrooms, three bathrooms, and three occupants, now that a daughter and son-in-law live with her. The cats won’t live much longer, nor will the dog.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, the tomato plants will probably still produce tomatoes next summer, but without Pa, who really cares? He crowed about how many tomatoes his fledgling tomato garden produced, more each year. And they were delicious. He would go out to look at them every morning before it got hot (which was an impressive feat in the blistering south Mississippi summer), and he’d take Mimi with him, making sure that she had the little notepad he had appropriated for this purpose. And he’d count the tomatoes that he took off the plants each day, ensuring that Mimi kept an accurate running tally. Those tomato plants gave him a sense of purpose over the last couple of years. It was something to do, instead of watching reruns of Match Game and smoking four packs of Winstons a day, wasting away in front of Mimi as she watched helplessly, her encroaching senility advancing in its cruel mercy.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, the aluminum boat is still in pretty good working shape. Actually, the boat itself is perfectly fine. The outboard engine’s hook-up to a turnkey ignition and steering wheel need a little calibrating, and who knows how long the gasoline has been in the tank or when the oil was last changed. The four-wheelers need to be cleaned up and test-run before deer season gets here. There’s no telling what went on inside the engines over the last eight months of inactivity, and if they need some tuning up, someone will have to arrange for pickup, maintenance and repair, and delivery. Someone needs to make sure that the family has a source for pecans, sweet corn, peas and beans, and maybe even a wild boar or deer this year. Someone’s going to have to put together the list of who gets what when we get it. Someone will need to drive over to Rodney and drop in to visit Frieda and Mike, Dale and Connie, and the rest, in his place. Someone will have to drive down to Hammond to get the good softshell crabs, and keep an eye out for a sale on shotgun shells. Somebody’s got to call friends and relatives and tell them about Pa’s passing. In a sense, this won’t be a very onerous task, since he outlived practically all of his friends. There is pecan-shelling to be done, and I’ll probably have to move the stack of cordwood from the far side of the carport to the near side so it’s easier to get to when they build a fire. And has anyone been over to the deer camp recently? How are the roads? Can we get all the way in with just the trucks, or do we have to have the four-wheelers? Can the four-wheelers get through the washout in the road? What’s the river level at Cairo? These are all pressing issues that need to be addressed at Mimi and Pa’s house, you see.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, these questions go unanswered, and the chores are incomplete. We can only compartmentalize Pa’s passing so much. We have to keep up with the things that kept him busy in an attempt to stave off the crippling realization that we will never hear his stories again, that he will never wink at us with that devilish glint in his eye again. We push it down deep inside where nobody can find it, this recognition that the man whose name is borne by my father, my brother, and my cousin’s first-born son, will never again tell us that we “done good,” or that he has a quick little job for us. If we don’t talk about it, it isn’t real, and Pa’s just in the other room, or at the deer camp, or fishing, or visiting with one of his numerous friends who have already passed on (the cognitive dissonance is a function of the stubbornness he gave all of his issue). He’s not gone, he’s just not here right now. Right?
At Mimi and Pa’s house, the wrought-iron patio furniture is rusting. The yard needs to be mowed. It’s not too bad yet, but it still could use tightening up. The bowl on the front porch that is used to feed the feral cats in the neighborhood is empty except for a little bit of dirty rainwater and a dead spider. Nobody has gone in the second bedroom on the left upstairs in more than ten months. There’s no particular reason for this, except that nobody in the house needs anything out of that room or has any real occasion to go in there. Pa’s undershirts are still folded in his dresser upstairs. The valet station in his armoir-style dresser still has his cologne (Old Spice) and deodorant, the aerosol kind in the green can, sitting out. The medicine cabinet in the master bathroom still has his old safety razor, with a couple of extra blades. Just in case.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, the silence is deafening. Mimi, slowly drifting into her own psyche, has no one to talk to much of the time. And the most reliable sound in the house, Pa’s voice, is a memory, and won’t even be that much longer. She doesn’t really cook anymore, which is a damned shame because she is one of the best cooks anyone knows. She doesn’t really cook anymore because cooking for one person is pretty difficult, and if my aunt and uncle want to eat, they usually do their own cooking. She’s also getting somewhat frail, and that mythical skillet is just a little too heavy for her to put on and take off the gas range anymore. Mimi went to the beauty shop every Tuesday for almost 60 years and got her hair and nails done. She doesn’t go much anymore. She did it for Pa, mostly, anyway.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, the home that served as the context and setting for most of my best childhood memories, and those of my cousins, aunts, and father, is turning into a catacomb. It is too painful even to walk inside. Maybe Mimi will recognize me today. Maybe I won’t have to explain where Pa is. I hope she’s asleep when I get there so I can just go back home and not have to find out.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, the freezers are slowly emptying, although the rate at which they do so is increasing. Nobody knows where the skillet is, and the spring on the back screen door has sprung and although it still pulls the door closed, it takes longer and doesn’t make the same noise. The butter is now in the refrigerator, and there is no bacon grease to be found. I can’t even remember the last time I ate small pancakes. Coffee at the Cracker Barrel is a buck twenty-nine for a sixteen-ounce cup. Match Game is still blasting from the TV. The hospital bed is being used as a place to hang clothes to dry and put folded laundry until it got put away. Pa’s home-visit medical bag, once shiny black leather, the symbol of his life’s work, was a moldering mass next to his easy chair until it was thrown away by the new housekeeper.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, the White Couch hasn’t had the cover taken off in years, and it doesn’t much look like this Christmas is going to change that. The upstairs TV room is now an office for my aunt. No one has stopped by to get any fish, or meat, or vegetables, in a couple of years. In fact, no one has stopped by to visit in quite a while. Mimi has resigned herself to just buying her vegetables at the supermarket from now on. The tomato plants are dying, and nobody is around to take care of them. The dwarf magnolia in the front yard is gone, and the live oak closest to the road is dying. That limb on the live oak closer to the house, the one that was so convenient for climbing, has been cut off. Most of the pine trees in the back yard have been cut down. Nobody’s going hunting much this year. Everyone’s too busy.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, Mimi can’t remember many of Pa’s stories, even though they were woven as the story of their lives together. She can’t remember the names and places, not just as parts of a story Pa used to tell, but as elements of her own life’s experiences.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, the phone doesn’t ring anymore. Someone stole the flatbed trailer and one of the four-wheelers last week, and the newly-installed deadbolt on the back door hasn’t been unlocked since.
At Mimi and Pa’s house, Mimi’s dead, but she’s the only one who doesn’t know.
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