The Last Place I Knew as Safe
I didn’t know, while I was living there, that my grandmother’s little (then) green house would become the last place in my life I could remember living without constantly bracing for what came next.
From my earliest memories through my senior year of high school, some of the best parts of my life happened behind that door. The house wasn’t grand. It sat quietly beneath the trees, with its small rooms, familiar smells, and ordinary comforts. Hard things happened during those years, too. But somehow, the house itself remained separate from them. It was the place I returned to. The place where I knew I belonged.
I thought there would always be another place like it.
I recently had the opportunity to be back in that neighborhood, so I had to stop and take a glance at the familiar house on Spruce Drive. Although the aesthetics have changed somewhat, for example, it’s now a soft blue color rather than the familiar hunter green from my childhood, by and large, it looks the same.
It wasn’t the color, however, that I recall so vividly. It was the memories the house contained.
Before the age of seven, the house was just a couple of miles from where I lived with my parents and two siblings. It’s where we would stop by for a bite of her famous “stickies” — the leftover pieces of pie crust she doused in butter and cinnamon. Having grown up during the Depression era, she never wasted a thing. During the summer months, you could find us picking green beans and cucumbers in her garden out back. We would also tag along with my dad when he administered her weekly allergy shots.
When I turned seven, however, we became her next-door neighbors when my parents bought the lot adjacent to her and built our first family home. By that time, we had become much more frequent pop-in visitors, and if she minded the constant interruptions, you would never have known it. She soon taught me how to mow her lawn with the push mower, and I loved having that big-girl task assigned just to me. I would also frequently negotiate coming over to clean her bathroom or do the dusting in exchange for a few quarters. My entrepreneur mindset was already taking root back then.
Perhaps my favorite memories of my grandmother’s little house centered around the holidays, specifically Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Eve. At least one of my mother’s siblings who lived the closest to us would join in the festivities with my cousins in tow. The traditional activities would always include watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV, playing catch football out on the road, eating as many of my grandmother’s pickled eggs as we could stomach before we knew we’d had too many, and waiting for dinner to end so we could dig in to her famous pies: rhubarb, coconut, pecan, and pumpkin.
Christmas Eve was a bit different. It was centered more around the neighborhood families, of which we were the only children in a predominantly retired setting. We love all that extra attention! Grandmother would host a drop-in every Christmas Eve or a night close by, and she would make all kinds of fun appetizers and desserts we would never get to enjoy any other time of year. My favorite was her homemade butter mints, which she would painstakingly make on a marble slab only when the outside temperature would drop below freezing. They would simply melt in your mouth, and I have yet to find a better-tasting version anywhere, except on the rare occasions when I would duplicate her recipe.
Several years later, my immediate family imploded, and I ended up living with my grandmother permanently during my high school years. I wrote about this previously here.
Even with the sheer craziness of what was happening within my immediate family, I knew my home with my grandmother was always the safe place I could return to. I’m sure she never intended to tackle child-rearing a second time, but she did it with grace and without complaint (at least not that she ever allowed me to see).
After I graduated from high school and went off to college, my visits home became more infrequent, as is often the case. Additionally, that sweet little home on Spruce Drive was sold, and my grandmother moved into another home, still in the same neighborhood, that I would come back to during breaks from school, but it never felt quite like home to me.
The night before I got married, I spent my last regular night in that home. My grandmother even insisted on giving up her own bedroom to me and one of my bridesmaids, so we would have more space to get ready. The next day, when I became a Mrs., the life I once recognized would never look the same again. Little did I realize at the time that nearly every home or season that followed carried instability, grief, divorce, death, financial loss, or the responsibility of holding everything together by myself.
I did not realize then that I was walking away from the last physical place where safety seemed to exist without effort.
I wish I had known to stand in the doorway of that little Spruce Drive home a little longer. To notice the light through the trees. To understand that I wasn’t simply leaving my grandmother’s house. I was leaving the last place where safety had never required anything from me.
Today, I try to pay more attention to the blessings when they come. To the moments of quietness and calm. I try to express gratitude for simplicity when I recognize it, as most of my life has been anything but uncomplicated.
When the overwhelm still tries to creep in, which it often does, I can close my eyes and circle back to that little green home, and almost immediately, I can feel the calm settling back over me once again. Maybe that’s why green is still one of my favorite colors to this day.