When the light hit her right, my grandmother transformed into the patron saint of home. Or maybe it’s just something about me and small kitchens during golden hour in South Florida, far too deep into the hot sticky summer to worry about missed assignments and failed expectations. Dorothy Munnings, my grandmother, would light a candle on the table, stick her feet into her favorite slippers, and take charge of the nine-by-seven-foot kitchen with all the authority of a war-hardened general.
And as for us? My cousins and I would cram ourselves on one of the two-generation old couches, backs sinking into the plush too-soft cushions; our shoes kicked off by the open door, the screen inviting in the air and not the mosquitoes.
So many of my favorite memories come from this place. From the sunshine on the back porch where all the kids would gather to watch the train go by while one of the aunties yelled out at us “Don’t get too close to those tracks, now!” to the sun showers coming down at 4 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon while everybody in the house still had their church dresses on. Gospel music and laughter were trapped in these walls, and everybody who stepped inside could hear it.
My grandmother sent kids down to the corner to get mangoes from the mango tree and mailed out boxes of ripe avocados to anyone who asked. Once, back home in North Carolina, she sent a box of two bright green avocado pears about the size of my head, each of them carefully wrapped in newspaper from decades past, stored next to the sofa for a time such as this.
To me and my cousins, her house was the holder of all mysteries. The medicine cabinet held the secrets of the universe, her bedroom housed the history of people I would never meet, and her cast iron skillet was crusted over with the recipe for all my hopes and dreams. The sitting
room in the back of the house, where her word was law, was covered with all the evidence me and my cousins could ever need to prove that our parents were, in fact, children once. Crowding around her chair, the one nobody ever sat on but her, we’d point and laugh at old school photos, the younger versions of the people we knew now.
My grandmother is dead now, off to wait for the second coming she would so urgently remind me and my cousins of, but I would like to write her a love poem for all the late evenings spent looking through her old photo albums, excited because Uncle Tommy (her oldest son) was
bringing over fried fish and somebody had just pulled a pie out of the oven and set it on the counter. We had cornbread, collard greens, short ribs, fried chicken, orange Fanta, and the best red velvet cake in the South housed on a glass platter sitting in the middle of the table—already missing a slice. Too heavy a meal for the hot summer but all the cousins, the aunts, the uncles, the great aunts and uncles—everybody who knew somebody came spilling in through the screened door, everybody looking to get a plate.
Home doesn’t have to be the place you return to most often. Home rests in the cabinet, alongside the pound cake pans and cast iron skillet. Home is sitting on my grandmother’s sofa, feet dangling off the side, watching your third straight hour of Jeopardy. Home is racing through the backyard and back into the house, sitting down somewhere when someone starts yelling at you about not letting out all the good air out. Home is a feeling that rises from the bottom of your
chest when you find yourself back in the place you’re most intimately familiar with. And I know where home is for me. It’s on the back porch of my grandmother’s house in South Florida, a can of soda sitting next to my plastic lawn chair and the sun warming my shoulders; the train is
rolling by about a hundred feet back from the house and I’m sitting just close enough to the backdoor to hear the sound of laughter.
