When we had lunch, my grandmother served us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with potato chips and sliced apples, and then apologized for the simple meal, but she said these were his favorite foods when he was a boy. We sat at the round wooden table, but really, there was nothing much to talk about. I watched the lake out the window while she and my mother talked, and when we finished eating, I asked my grandmother to take me outside while my mother cleaned up the dishes.
The lawn that led to the lake was small, and her dog, a springer spaniel named Penny, loped down to the water in front of us and started sniffing among the lily pads for small fish and minnows. The lake was mostly calm at midday, the cottages that circled the front half of it slightly hazy and quiet with the occasional exception of a slamming screen door. The children who would normally be outside playing had likely gone home for the start of the school year. The land on the opposite side was undeveloped, and there were trees along the bank, and some farmland on one end where, tucked away from the lake’s edge, you could see a corner of a field of corn.
We stood silently for a while near a willow tree that grew just short of the bank. I finally asked my grandmother, “Did my dad like coming out here to visit?”
“He did, I think. As much as any grown man enjoys visiting his mother. I don’t think he ever came out here without saying something about how small the place seemed compared to when he was little, when he could still swing out over the bank on these willow branches. Some afternoons, he’d pull a lawn chair out to the edge of the lake and sit there for an hour or so. Just looking out over the water. I wish I could tell you what he was thinking about, but he seemed to find it peaceful.”
“It is peaceful.”
“You used to come out here on the weekend to visit all by yourself. We bought you some ice skates one Christmas when you were only five or six, and I had to call you in those winter evenings or you’d have kept skating on into the dark.”
I smiled. “Is it nice in the winter?”
“It’s cold! But it’s beautiful after the water freezes over. The only time I saw the whole lake ice up at once was on one of those weekends you stayed over. It was right after the New Year, and we had a fresh snowfall. We were lying on the couch together, and you were asleep. You might’ve been in third grade back then. The lake was choppy, with little whitecaps everywhere, and they looked pretty because they matched the snow on the banks. I’d set aside the book I was reading to you, and kept glancing out the window, but fell asleep myself for a minute or two. Then I thought I heard someone walking in the front of the yard, and it woke me, and I sat up, and no one was there, but the wind had died, and I could see this perfectly clear skin of ice slowly spread itself over the water, from the banks to almost the middle of the lake.”
She looked up at me then, and smiled shyly, as though she’d revealed something about herself that she hadn’t intended.
“When you woke up, you asked to put your skates on first thing,” she said.
I gave her a hug, and told her I’d like to sit out near the lake for a few minutes by myself, like my father used to do, and she squeezed my hand and brought back a lawn chair for me before she went inside.
*
Can you grieve for someone you don’t remember? About whom you’ve only heard stories, even if those stories include a version of yourself you can’t recall? Or is it like waking in a theater at the end of a movie where everyone around you is crying?
I sat for a long while trying to recall my father, trying to imagine him as a boy swinging on the boughs of a willow tree, splashing his sisters in the water out at the end of the dock where my grandmother’s old boat was tied, and I imagined my father, too, pulling the oars that would lead the boat across the water, and I imagined I may have sat in the bow a time or two while he rowed across the lake.