zacharyhawkins

2010 SECOND PLACE / ENTRY FEE CATEGORY

Note: Things to Remember

By Zachary Hawkins

After my grandmother moved into her new room, my aunt taped up notes all around it. A list of Grandma’s favorite channels hangs from the television. Nedra, you’re at Timbercrest Retirement. Remember Mom, I love you.

At the entrance to the memory unit there is a keypad on the wall. You type in a code and the doors unlock. Click.

Grandma recognizes me and I am relieved. She squeezes tightly when I hug her. She doesn’t use my name, just calls me honey--but she’s always done that. I haven’t seen the worst of it. My parents tell me about how she’ll ask where she is and what she is doing there. She knows there is something to remember, she just doesn’t know what it is.

When I was in college, my grandmother began writing her memoirs (mem-wahs, she called them, slicking a little polish on her Hoosier twang). I never knew her to be much of a writer before, but she became downright prolific. After I graduated, she started turning the memoirs into a novel. From what I could tell, this simply meant telling family stories in the third person. I would get emails that read something like, You will be receiving a revised copy of the first 18 chapters of my novel. Thank you for reading it and you may critique it if desired. Gram. New messages stacked up in my inbox—pages and pages of family history.

Back then, I filed it away. But lately I’ve been paging through. The novel opens on our ancestor, Robert Hodgson, sitting beneath a starry sky in 1710, contemplating moving his young family to America. Over 400,000 words later, it trails off with some notes for a chapter about my dad’s ordination in 1980.

She wrote over 1,600 pages and she doesn’t remember typing a single word.

So I bring her stories and I ask her to read them to me. First the one about her father. Having seen his future wife for the first time at a picnic, desperate to get her attention, he climbs to the top of a limestone bluff and jumps into the creek below, nearly cracking his head on the rocks. It’s a good story. I tell her I like the way she writes. “I don’t even remember writing it,” she says, chuckling. “I know the story, but I don’t remember writing it.”

Next I hand her the story of her birth. She reads this one to herself, pausing to mull over details out loud. At the mention of her family’s wood fired range, she remembers how her grandmother used to wipe the top of it with a bread wrapper, the wax melting and polishing the black surface.

“It was a big thing,” she says of the stove. She raises her hand as if to touch it. “On this end was a reservoir with a lid that lifted up, and we kept rainwater in there all the time. When there was a fire in the stove the water was hot, and it was mainly used for washing hair, and the undies, and things like that.

“Up above the range there were two warming ovens that had doors that pulled down like this,” she says, reaching to open the doors, “and they would stay flat. Grandma, after she’d cut out her biscuits, she’d put the pan up there and let ‘em kind of raise up a little bit before she baked ‘em.

“And of course down here was the oven.” She puts a hand inside it. “Grandma knew just how hot it was. She could stick her hand in the middle of the oven, and by the amount of time she could keep her hand in there she’d know how hot that oven was.”

Her eyes return to the paper. The story ends with her grandmother standing in the kitchen. Her father walks in to announce the birth, disappointment in his voice. He’d wanted a boy. “Wednesday’s child is full of woe,” my grandmother writes.

She puts the paper in her lap.

“What’s it like to read that story?” I ask her.

A long pause. “It’s pretty personal,” she says. She laughs to herself, softly.

I say that I am grateful for these pages. I tell her they help me to know where I come from.

“Well,” she says, looking like she’s ready to deliver a punch line. “Now you know!” She chuckles. Then she sighs.

I ask her to read me another story.

Contact Zach at zach@hawkinsfamilyfarm.com to congratulate him on this enjoyable piece.