As you were

As you were
Originally uploaded by * Eartha Kitsch *

This moved me to tears, she put into words the way I feel about my parents and family members that are gone, now. I had to share it with you!

As you were

Fall never comes without me thinking a lot about my grandparents. I figure it has a lot to do with the trinity of holidays that come right after Fall starts and the fact that I lived next door to my Grandparents for my entire childhood. The seasons changing always meant that I'd get to help my grandmother decorate her house for the holidays. The chill returning to the air always promised a weekly bowl of her homemade vegetable soup made from the vegetables that she'd canned and frozen from my Grandfather's garden during the Summer of that year. Fall meant that things were about to look, taste and become magical.

October brought Halloween when my Grandfather would always sit at the kitchen table to prepare little individual paper sacks of candy for the trick-or-treaters and enjoyed answering the doorbell to give them out. He continued this well into the time when the trick-or-treaters and the neighborhood became older and rougher and family members urged him to leave his porch light off and ignore them for fear of his safety.

October also meant the smell of burning leaves. My Grandfather excelled at burning leaves and my family always joked that he was a "closet pyromaniac". He'd search the yard for things to burn when leaves were scarce....cardboard boxes, limbs...anything. The entire block would fill up with smoke and I can remember my Mom running out to snatch her not-so-clean-anymore laundry from the clothes line while muttering and frowning. The large oak tree above his fire pit always had blackened bark and charred limbs from the height that his great fires went to. My brother and I were sheltered but inwardly in awe of his mightiness in fire building. To this day, I can't light a match without flinching and squealing when the tiny flame bursts forward at the edge of my fingertips.

November brought not only Thanksgiving with the big extended family dinner and cousin wrestling but also my Grandmother's birthdays. She always claimed two days in November as her birthdays saying that the birth date on her birth certificate was wrong by two days. I don't know if anyone could ever prove or disprove this but two birthdays sounded like fun to me as a kid.

December brought Christmas. Oh yes, Christmas. The day after Thanksgiving, my Grandmother would call me over to help her decorate her house. Up into that attic I'd climb, scaling lightly like a cat burglar around the sharp metal attic fan workings and blown insulation to bring down the decorations. First, I'd put up her white Christmas tree and decorate it to her specifications with red satin balls -and only red satin balls because that was the way she'd done it for years. (Later in life she insisted that I also attach red velvet bows to the ends of the branches which I did only under protest and respect.) Then she'd have me put the red Christmas candle lights in all of the front windows and snake extension cords behind all of the furniture (Oh to have those loose, limber knees again). I'd then tape the plastic mistletoe over the door jam and hang two plastic Christmas wreathes, one on the front door and one on the back. The final touch was cast when she'd arrange the lanky limb Christmas elf into the red velvet shoe full of tissue paper and sit him on my Grandfather's chair side table. The gumdrop tree came last. She'd let me eat as many as I wanted and we chased them down with Pepsi cola as we pierced the gumdrops with toothpicks and arranged them on a cone shaped styrofoam base. Every day when the mailman came, she'd anxiously wait to see if she got any Christmas cards and if she did, she would have me tape them to the pine cornice above her window in a staggered yet exact manner.

On Christmas day, the entire family would assemble at my Grandparent's house. My Grandfather always bought gifts of tube socks for all of the boys in the family and something cute for the girls - and as he was a dealer and yard sale guru, the gifts were usually something that he'd bought in bulk at sale or auction house. . At the end of the Christmas gathering, he'd pull a stack of sealed envelopes from his shirt pocket and walk around, handing them out one by one. Inside he'd placed money for each family member. We'd all give him big hugs or kisses on the cheek. He'd seem embarrassed but I think that he secretly loved it. At this same party, he would go to the back room closet and bring out the creaking old slide projector and remove the huge Siamese cat portrait to show family slides on the living room wall. We'd all laugh and gasp at our old hair styles and childhood awkwardness captured in tiny square frames. The tiny shards of light and dust from the projector danced around my Grandfather's sly smile in the darkness of the room as he slowly click, click, clicked.

My Grandmother passed when I was nearly thirty of complications from strokes and smoking and my Grandfather passed away from cancer several years after. I've been told that as an adult, holidays never truly feel magical again until you have kids and can see them all anew through their eyes. I don't doubt this but I also think that they never truly feel as magical because for so many of us, we can never again see them through the eyes and voices of those who we loved so much and who have gone on before us.

The photo above is one of those very slides from my Grandfather's collection. It shows he and my Grandmother standing in the driveway together. A lot of times I think that I want to be like them. Other times, I realize that I might not ever reach that goal and I just merely want to tell the world that there were and are people like them so that we can...I don't know, grasp on to them with all of our might when we have the chance...breathe in deeper, run our hands across the now.

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"Then summer fades and passes and October comes. We'll smell smoke then,
and feel an unexpected sharpness, a thrill of nervousness, swift elation, a
sense of sadness and departure." - Thomas Wolfe

Uploaded by * Eartha Kitsch * on 28 Sep 09, 12.01PM EDT