Grandma’s small house, clad in pink asphalt siding, sat tucked inside a grove of pine trees, high on a hill. It was a narrow house with the kitchen in front, a main room in the middle, and two side by side bedrooms in the back, their doorways each facing into the main room. Acorns and orange pine needles lined the steep, rutted driveway that led up to it. At the top, across the gravel drive, Grandma grew a garden of tulips that floated color across the yard.

   Two cement squares laid like a short piece of sidewalk led up to her front door. Once inside, there was a landing, then three short steps covered with linoleum that led up into a sunny kitchen. A formica table with three aluminum chairs sat in front of a window looking down toward Sparrow lake. A black wood-burning cook stove, central to grandma’s world, stood across from the window.

Windows were everything in Grandma’s tiny house.  Inside the second room were two rocking chairs, an old bureau with an ornate mirror and another, larger table that sat in front of bay windows also looking toward the lake. In this bay window, I learned from Grandma how to braid, how to crochet, and how to use the treadle sewing machine. It was here that the old woman and the girl pored over black and white photographs stored in cigar boxes stacked inside the bureau drawer. Grandma’s short rounded fingernail pointed out the faces, giving names and shape to time that spanned three generations.

Grandma wore full-size aprons over her dresses that hung looser as she got older. The aprons were made from light cotton prints. They looped over her head and had bib fronts, decorated with rickrack or sturdy binding tape and each had pockets and cloth ties that wrapped behind. 

    She wore sturdy lace-up shoes and thick shiny support stockings. Her two button-up sweaters, worn open except for the top button, were the same two sweaters she’d been wearing for years, and as long as they remained useful she saw no need for new ones. At night, before getting into bed, she took long, thin hair out of its bobby pins and braids and let it fall down her back against a floor-length flannel nightgown. First thing every morning, she wove the hair together again, winding the braids into coils or across the top of her head.

   Most everything in grandma’s house faced toward the windows. The view beyond those windows could leave a city person breathless. The great hill sloping down to Sparrow Lake was “just the perfect place for down-hill skiing!” cabin people told her when they showed up on her doorstep, after “simply hours” of looking for a way to reach the top, “without trespassing of course. You never know, some country folks might shoot you!” Usually Grandma told them no, especially when they talked loud and acted like she didn’t know what it was she had in front of her own nose. Just because she never skied, that long hill was not wasted in Grandma’s mind. She sent them on their way by clamming up and acting shy. But back inside her house she’d say, “If folks knew how to work they wouldn’t have time to look so silly getting exercise.” 

   When Grandma came to visit her son’s house, she hiked down the hill at an angle, passing the plateau where for decades she grew outstanding vegetables. She passed the rock pile on Cemetery Hill named for a baby girl buried there in 1920, back when the Peterson’s still owned the place. Veering gradually away from the lake, she hiked through an open field, pulling up every mullein weed she saw–which is why she had fewer mullein weeds than any of her neighbors, or so she said. She then climbed through a barbed wire fence, crossed over the ditch and up to the black-topped county road that passed right by our front yard. Except for mid-summer when the trees were full, I could watch her going home again, or look across that field at night and see the lights on up in Grandma’s house.