Vogelfrei
Recently, my sweet grandmother passed away. She was a strong woman of faith, and I will miss her. I wrote the piece below for her memorial.
My first memory of Oma was from her house in Glendora, close to 30 years ago. More specifically I remember the view from her upstairs bedroom. Sitting between her and Opa, the morning sunlight cascading through the open window, scattered by the water in the pool below. I remember the smell of fresh coffee and the utterly bequem comforter that wrapped around us, a luxury Oma’s bed was never without. I remember the tone of the conversation, and her intense interest in what I had to say. I have no recollection of what we talked about, but I remember enjoying our conversation greatly.
A man reflecting on his boyhood is left to sift through an expansive sea of feelings, smells, and still frame images. Growing up on the ranch I remember the scent of dusty red sunsets, I remember sitting with brothers deep in a field under a crisp black sky, feeling small and full of wonder. And amidst all of those memories and smells, those sunsets and those hot dusty days are scattered so many memories with Oma.
I remember her watering her driveway each afternoon in the summer as I rode by on my bike, always smiling and waving. I remember harvesting the fruit in the orchard under her direction, sampling apples, apricots, almonds, indiscriminately. Knowing that as good as the raw fruit was, it couldn’t compare the crumble it would eventually become. I remember Oma sampling the homemade “apricot wine” my brothers and I had made by stomping apricots with our raw and probably unwashed feet, mixing in bread yeast, fingers crossed. She took a sip, smiled and exclaimed, “Not bad!”. I remember the vole she squeezed out of a still wriggling, recently headless rattlesnake. She squeezed it out of the snake like a child might squeeze a popsicle out of its wrapping, and with the same excitement. That woman had some guts. I remember watching her sit and hold a conversation with a beautiful girl fifty years her junior during a square dancing party. They sat and they talked for an hour, utterly captivated in conversation with the bright lights of the dance floor cascading into the dusk. I knew that if Oma found someone interesting, that person must be someone special indeed. That beautiful girl would later become my wife. I remember, I remember, I remember.
Thirty years later I found myself again at Oma’s bed. It wasn’t the same physical bed or the same house. It was a metal hospice bed that lowered and reclined and was designed to make comfortable that last stretch of this life’s journey as our bodies start to die. But the comforter, and the conversation, the intense interest in what I had to say, that was all the same. Again I found myself between Oma and Opa, with morning sunlight streaming through an open window. I found myself again in that same place of olfactory bliss as the scent of coffee and newly opened flowers wrapped around us. And in that moment I knew this would be the last time I would see my sweet Oma. I would say goodbye in much the same way that I first said hello. And I knew that upon leaving, all those memories would remain to guide me on my own path from where I started back to where I began. Those memories would instruct me in how to live with a wild sacrificial servant’s heart, how to live in grace and faith. How to live with guts. And what a gift that is.