Story #11 Tulip Bulbs and Huckleberries (Small Workshop)

Danielle Orner
Story # 11
March 26, 2007
Tulip Bulbs and Huckleberries
The Rose Valley Senior Assisted Living Community is surrounded by a tall fence. It is made of metal bars and painted a cheer turquoise color to compliments the beige stucco buildings. From the parking lot, I can see a few white haired people moving in staggered slow steps about the courtyard with their clunky walkers.
“What’s the fence for?” I nod toward the seniors and the turquoise barrier while questioning my grandma. I have to look down to address her because she is so short. I usually make conversation with her salt and pepper boy-cut hair.
“Some of them try to get out.” My grandma knows all the procedures and the gossip at Rose Valley because she is my great grandmother’s primary caregiver. She comes every other day with treats, news, and the offer of company. She used to take her out to the store but my great grandmother is so bent over that getting in and out of the Volvo is too epic a task for one afternoon. “See that man there in the black hat and brown cardigan,” my grandma points to a dark figure leaning against the turquoise bars. “He always tries to sneak out through the lobby when visitors are buzzed out by the front desk. He is very lucid and charming so when he asks new people who have never visited before to kindly hold the door for him, they do. The nurses found him once wandering down the street with his walker in the sunshine.” I study the man dressed all in shabby browns and leaning against the fence with a slight hunch. The brim of his camel felt suit hat shades his face but I imagine it is wrinkled with a hint of a mischievous grin and clear blue eyes sharp with longing.
“You know your great grandma got out once too. It happened about a month or two after she first started living here. She didn’t get far at all before they caught up to her. They asked her where she was going and she told them she was walking home.” My grandma sighs. I wonder what my great grandmother remembered as home. Did she think of the senior apartments she lived in with her own kitchen before she almost burnt the place down because she forgot to turn off the stove? Did she think of the regular apartment just down the street from the supermarket? Or did she think back to the cabin in Idaho where she left all her handmade quilts, her garden, her bird feeders, and her dead husband?
The family moved her away from her two story cabin with its wrap around deck the winter she fell in the snow. She fell between the garage and the backdoor. Unable to stand back up, she lay in pile of snow as more icy flakes covered her small body and melted through her periwinkle down coat, the one with the pinecones and cardinals stitched on it. Many of the neighboring cabins were only occupied in the summer so she was alone. She called out to her big black dog, Bailey, in desperation. He bounded through the snow playful and came to lick her face. While his warm wet tongue cleaned the snowflakes from her wrinkles, my great grandmother grabbed on to his collar. He eventually pulled her to safety. When she told the story to the family, she only meant for them to note Bailey’s valor. She had no idea that the fall would tip the argument everyone was having about her. The cabin on the lake was sold and my great grandmother was moved into a northern California apartment complex.
A nurse with half-rim glasses dangling on a gold chain glances up when we walk into the lobby. The room is decorated with replica impressionist visions of rivers and meadows. Everything from the carpets to the wall paper is a pastel version of pink, salmon, green, and grey. The room is unnaturally childish and cheery.
“Hey Sissy, I am sure Marjory will be happy to have some visitors. And who might this beautiful woman be?” The nurse adjusts her glasses across her plump flesh nose to examine me. I hate that people call my grandma Sissy instead of Hazel or Mrs. Crowley but she insists on it. The name reminds her of her country hippy days when she raised her own livestock as well as eight children.
“Oh this is my oldest granddaughter. She goes to college down in Los Angeles and has come to see her sweet GG while she is on spring break,” my grandma keeps talking but I zone out until the nurse looks directly at me.
“You must be Katy then. You know she still talks about you sometimes.”
“Yah, I know. My grandma calls me when she does.” I had heard plenty of stories about my GG awaking from the fog of memory loss to ask a family member if they knew her great granddaughter. She would then proceed to tell anyone who would listen all about me. Sometimes she even knew how old I was.
The chatty nurse finally buzzes us through to the courtyard. My grandma and I make our way between the slow-motion walkers who were all concentrating on the red-brick tiled ground. I think about the nature films in which they speed up the footage of a flower blooming and wonder what patterns these withered grey creatures dressed in hanging knit cardigans and orthopedic shoes would make visible in the fast forward mode.
The buildings are set up like dormitories. Grandma leads us to a door that says Marjory Crowley in cursive. There is a little glass display case by the door and in it someone has placed a black and white photograph of my great grandfather leaning against a plow, a miniature quilt hanging on a doll house chair, and a doll with a spool body and tons of buttons strung together for limbs. We let ourselves in. The residents are not permitted to lock their doors.
“Hello, hello GG I have brought a special visitor for you.” My grandma calls into the tiny room.
“We will be out in a bit. We are just cleaning up in here.” A young woman’s voice calls from behind the bathroom door. I can hear my GG’s voice mumbling something and the young woman speaking words of comfort as if to a troubled child. I examine my GG’s room as my grandma tells me a story about what GG did last week. The bed is a narrow twin with one of my GG’s handmade quilts folded three times across it to keep from dragging on the floor. A glass gnome with a tall red hat sits on a swing above a music box. My GG’s illustrated book of gnomes rest on the table beside it. I remember reading it on storm summer afternoons at her cabin. There is a pot of dirt with flaking brown bulbs sticking out of it. Two green sprouts peek from each bulb. This is all that is left of my GG’s garden. My grandmother finishes her story about another female resident who walked into my GG’s room and started trying on her clothes. GG found her and somehow the ended up sitting on the bed and holding hands as if they had been dear friends for years. Grandma found them this way, both wearing one of my GG’s sweaters with little robins flying about on the front and clasping hands in silence.
A tiny bent woman with tousled grey hair and a lemon-yellow sweater comes hobbling out of the bathroom. A young woman with long blond hair and blue scrubs holds both of her twisted hands to support her. My GG’s hands have thick blue veins protruding through the transparent wrinkled skin. I hold my breath until the nurse has guided her to the bed and propped her up on the edge. My GG’s body looks like a C. Her back is curved into a hunch covered in lemon-yellow fabric. She cranes her neck to look up at us like a turtle carefully poking its head out of a shell. Her eyes are blank. She doesn’t recognize us. The nurse edges back to a corner to give us privacy but she doesn’t leave the room. The high pitched whine of GG’s hearing aids masks the silence of the room.
“Hey GG, I have come to visit you.” I sit beside her on the bed careful not to disturb her balance. She looks at me like a confused child. I trace the delicate stitches in around the blue quilt squares until I reach her hand resting in a white square with a bluebell print. I run my fingertips across her thin skin, which is as soft as the worn silk edges of a favorite baby blanket. She doesn’t move.
Holding her hand, I remember lounging on her wooden porch swing with her when I was eight years old. We watched the sun transform the lake into a gold gleaming disk and the sky into a quite explosion of orange, pink, and red. I ate vanilla ice cream covered with her deep purple huckleberry sauce. The whole family picked the berries in the midday heat and filled plastic buckets for huckleberry pancakes, pies, jellies, and sauce. My chapped lips were stained purple. My brown bob of hair was tangled and sweat from climbing trees all evening and it smelled of lake water. My knees boasted red scabbing cuts decorated with grass stains and dirt. My GG held my momentarily still body against her despite the sweat and stains. The ice cream melted into a dull grey stick pool at the bottom of the bowl. The sun retreated below the surface of the lake and was followed by a black curtain studded with stars. The crickets strung up their orchestra for the day’s exit music and still my GG and I sat on the porch like two lovers in a movie theater unaware that the credits had started to roll.
“Do you know that I have the most beautiful great granddaughter with the greenest eyes and a full-face smile?” GG asked the question to the room.
“Yes. I know her, GG. I know her.”