ginnygram

Once in awhile, I need to be somewhere besides where I am. (You’ve been there, too: In the middle seat on a flight, under the hairdryer, waiting at the DMV.)

I go here. This is our summer kitchen down at the lake house. Best we can figure from local anecdotes, it was built in the 1960s, using timber milled from the property, plus materials salvaged from all over the county. The vintage-y Christmas lights are beacons in the dang-dark nights, whether you’re navigating up from the dock or down from the house. And a rainy day tin-roof timpani is just about the best sound in the world. Sitting here on any given day or night, you can watch deer, muskrats, snakes, lightning bugs, hummingbirds, bluebirds, coyote, eagles, woodpeckers, falling leaves, falling snow, and falling stars.

The people from whom we bought the lake house wanted to tear down the summer kitchen to build something “nicer.”

This is Maeve. She is very busy helping me make a big bowl of fruit salad. Do you see that locket around her neck? Here’s how she conned charmed me out of it. First, you have to know that she didn’t really know me from Adam’s house cat. Or housecoat, which spell-check thinks I mean. I’m her aunt, but we live far, far apart, and well…anyway, she visited last summer with her family.

We live in her late grandparents’ house, so we had to go have a look-around. We have a guest room that’s got some cool stuff in it, like a gothic revival bed, some really old and creepy dolls, and a bowl of costume jewelry. Maeve found a gold locket in the bowl, and declared, “Is this a locker? I’ve always wanted a locker. Can I have it?” Then, “Does it open?” Then, seeing my baby picture and my bronze shoe, also said, “And I want that picture in it.”

We agreed to work on that together, and started downstairs. She stopped in her little 5-year-old tracks and looked at me in earnest. “Do you live here?” Yes. “Hmm. If you die before my mom, I’ll have to put your picture in this locker. But if my mom dies first, I’ll have to put her picture in it.”

Pause.

“I’ll probably have to put your picture in it.”

For about the last 20 years, I’ve been dragging around a rubber snake to scare little kids (and a few grown-ups). I’ve taken it camping, I’ve coiled it on the front porch, and I’ve just let it hang out in the back yard. It turns out that the joke is on me. When we pulled up to the lake house yesterday, this six-foot Indiana Black Snake was sunning herself on the driveway. And what was my first thought? Oh, did I leave my rubber snake in the driveway?

The best part of this story happened two years ago, when we heard a rustling overhead in the summer kitchen. Let me see if I can find those photos.

(And by the way, the way I feel about snakes is pretty much the way I feel about spiders: Live and let live, unless you are poisonous.)

Maybe this is my foot, but maybe it is Bucky’s. It does not have a name or an age written on it, as did most of the hands and feet in our grandparents’ silver drawer.

Bet I have your attention now.

About once a year, Mar Mar and Granddaddy would bring home the stuff with which he made dental molds. In her kitchen, Mar Mar would whip up a batch of  squishy goop and we’d have to stick a hand or a foot in it and hold very still for it to set. (That was asking a lot.) When it was set, you worked your little hand or tootsie out of the goop with a schloop! Then Mar Mar would pour the plaster into the mold. It didn’t take long until she could peel away the rubbery goop and — voila! — there’d be a lil piece of yourself. And because she kept all of them, even the “outtakes,” she had a big dining-room drawer full of little hands and feet. When friends came over, they almost always asked to look in the drawer, which was so normal to us, but so not-normal to them. I felt totally special. “What, you don’t have your feet in a drawer?”

When we were all grown up, and it came time to sort through the drawer and claim our pieces, Bucky and I had to compare our little toes. We think this is my little toe.