Friday, November 17, 2006

10:54 am, garden house

I am using the wood pile as metaphor now. It’s all stacked up messy and full outside my window. Just like my writing all stacked up messy and full inside my head.

I use the wood to stoke the fire of this tiny garden house in the icy cold of our Michigan winter. For two years now, the wood pile has been haphazardly added to. A new room was built onto our little house and a guest house added to our lot for visiting children and grand children. As the new spaces emerged, the scrap wood was piled atop our existing wood supply.   Now the “new room” in the main house is finished and the “barn” is ready for occupancy. In those same years, my writing has been accumulating in bits and pieces of half begun, half finished imaginings. 

The wood pile holds original timbers from the roof  framing of our old house. These old timbers, saved for our fireplace show signs of a fire long ago far before anyone here can remember fire. They, like my research and writing, hold a forgotten history. Now those old scarred timbers are destined for a new fire and the angle of our roof has been reshaped to allow more windows and a much wider view. I hope the same for my writing: more windows, more light, a much better view of  the world.

Now, as I sit down near the warmth of the fire and see the wood pile waiting outside to offer more warmth as the winter progresses, I begin again as I’ve begun a thousand times to write.

This time I am hoping the odds in my stories will be more in my favor. This time I want to write about my little granddaughter Mary and the dream I had shortly after she was born. A dream of us flying together through the skies, holding hands. A dream I had forgotten about until my daughter Maggie reminded me.

I want to write about Mary Cunningham and Mimi Wheeler. Both women are the daughters of grocers. Both women are about my age and both women I met by chance just recently. My grandmother was also the daughter of a grocer.  So meeting these woman was probably really not by chance.

My grandmother was born in New York City in 1880. Her father’s store

 “Sommer Brother’s Market” was located at 910 Sixth Ave. I am familiar with this long forgotten store through a picture of my father and his older brother as boys, playing in a toy replica of this grocery store. Atop the miniature store is proudly labeded its name and address. Without this picture, my grandmother’s history would be lost to me. I imagine that my grandmother’s grocery  was one of those little markets stories that are so prevalent in New York City. There is no sign of it anymore in the neighborhood as the streets have been changed and that address no longer exits. 

Mary Cunninghams father and mother were grocers in Minnesota in the early 1940’s. They owned a little grocery store attached to their home.  I met Mary traveling home to Ann Arbor from Chicago. It was a Thursday’s evening when I boarded the train to find all the window seats taken. I choose to sit next to a qomen with grey hair who was doing needle work on her lap. She had a gorgeous quilted material opened in her lap and she was working it with a needle. I thought she was quilting.

Soon after the train left the station, I took my journal to the dinning car and wrote up my day’s experiences: staying with my daughgter and her family, playing with Mary and PJ., my son coming to baby-sit so I could catch my train…all these important moments of my life with my children and grandchildren, I happily recorded on the rolling train. As the train ride progressed I went back to my seat and slowly and easily Mary and I fell into conversation.  It began I think with the knitting I took from my bag. We discussed my yarn, what I was making, what she had been working on, how far she had come where we were both going. And of course our grandchildren.

Somewhere in that conversation, she told me that her parent’s had a grocery store in Minnesota when she was growing up. At this point I would hav told her about the “Grocer’s Daughter Chocolates” in Empire, Michigan.  I first heard about this little store from the woman who cuts my hair. Jennifer had just returned from a trip up North the week before I was preparing to go.    

She highly recommended this store.  

Ten days later, my husband David and I drove to the store on our way to Sleeping Bear Dunes. Grocer’s Daughter Chocolate  was situated in a non descript single lever building shared with a coffee beanery.   As I stepped to the front door a sepia photo of a dark haired woman with shoulder length hair immediately caught my eye.  Her curly hair pinned atop her head and brushed away from her face accentuated her inviting smile. She reminded me of 1940’s  co-ed. Her trim white pointed collar lying atop her dark jacket might easily have been a picture of my own mom.  This apparently was the logo of the store. I knew I would like the store before I even entered but there was more circumstance, and more memory to come. We stepped inside.

I noticed right away the woman who ran the store had an accent. It was David however who recognized it as a Danish accent. He asked her about it and she answered quickly that “yes” she was from Denmark. I told her that my son lived in Denmark, that he was married to a Danish girl that they lived in Fredericksberg. It was all very cordial and went very quickly. We bought chocolates, talked for awhile and left.

Later that day, as we drove by the Lelanaw school, a memory began to resurface. It came very slowly to David at first and later as he shared the beginning glint of it with me, the memory became more round and full, until we finally had it almost completely remembered.

Some years ago, David and I were on an airplane. There was a woman sitting next to the window in our aisle. I was sitting in the middle seat and David sat on the end. Somewhere, in the middle of the flight, the woman next to the window said to me as she stood up “ May I please pass”   in softly accented English I had just returned a month or ago from Denmark where I had been visiting my son. I had asked him to teach me how to say excuse me in Danish. A quite literal translation of the Danish phrase would be  “May I please pass”. So I thought right away, this woman must be Danish. When she returned to her seat, I asked if she were and she was quite surprised that I had guessed her nationality.

We had a nice conversation although I don’t remember it. I remember only that she was pretty with graying wavy hair. David remembered that she was affiliated with Leelanau school, that was what instigated his memory, driving by this school some five years later…and only minutes after meeting the grocer’s daughter from Denmark.

Some days later I returned to the store with my friend Elfrieda who was visiting from Milwaukee. The store was much busier on that day. There was a young woman at the counter helping us and “the chocolatier” was busy  making chocolates in the kitchen which stood a ways back behind the counter. When I began telling the story which my husband remembered, the grocer’s daughter looked up very skeptically. It was as if she was listening to me but much too busy with the work at hand than to join in my memory work. Then suddenly she interrupted my story …….” And you knew I was Danish because of the way I said” May I pass”!!

She had remembered the story too and was quite charmed I think for a moment. Then she went back making her chocolates. I remember being a little disappointed that she didn’t take more time to talk with me.

Now as I think about it, she was working and I was vacationing. How much time could she take away from her work? Making her own chocolate and selling it herself must be very time consuming work.  I wanted to talk about the picture. She said it was a picture of her mother and since she looked so much like my mother, I felt we had grounds for a discussion.  It was silly of me to expect more from this woman. But none the less I did.

Perhaps, that’s why I am writing here today, trying to get more out of the story.  Because this is a story of odds being in my favor. The odds to find two women who are both grocer’s daughers mixed with my own grandmother being a grocer’s daughter. The odds of dreaming of flying with a precious new granddaughter, through the sky in a haze of happiness and adventure.

These stories are  more than a connection, it is more than a coincidence that I should meet these women. It’s a marker, a reminder of my writing, a reminder of the importance of my writing. My writing is the unknown of who I am and who I can be. That is the importance of these women and their stories and of my flying with my granddaughter….they are all through my writing taking me to an unknown space which I will discover in my writing.

They needn’t be more than that, that is enough.  A reminder that everything is connected, that people’s lives intertwine. That is what I have always looked for in my writing and when I put off  writing, I put off remembering just those facts.

Does it all mean anything or nothing at all? It’s a part perhaps of a larger story, a part perhaps of my autobiography that I was writing when I digressed to tell this story.