Unfinished Business

         When I was younger, it seemed to me that my grandmother could produce any object I desired from one of what I was sure were innumerable storage closets and bedrooms fallen into disuse. When I think about it, her home was one that would make me uncomfortable, were I to today encounter it for the first time. Mess makes me uncomfortable, and I suppose that’s not a trait everyone shares, but I believe everyone knows the feeling of discomfort in a home. There’s a forced kindness and a pins-and-needles feeling, despite the strange moral obligation one feels to relax. There were no obligations in my grandmother’s home, and relaxation came naturally.
         My earliest memories have exactly two distinct backdrops. One is my grandmother’s garden. Without a fence, it seemed to me that her property stretched all the way towards the woods which I sometimes explored and to the far away hills I’d always imagined I’d one day scale. Those woods are gone today, replaced by modern developments, and so many houses that will not last even half the time my grandmother’s house has so resolutely stood. My grandmother’s home was the oldest building in sight. They don’t build anything to last anymore, not even the homes.
         Like so many boys, I’d had lofty career expectations as a child. My personal goal was space explorer. Unlike most of my childhood companions, I actually researched the topic, thinking that it would perhaps bring me closer to the goal. I was always entranced by the four Galilean moons of Jupiter. To me, they were not simply the four largest satellites of the fifth planet from the sun, but something more majestic; fantastic alternatives to what seemed to be the very drab planet Earth. Io, the innermost of Jupiter’s moons, is the most volcanic body in the solar system. There is so much volcanic activity that its surface cannot be accurately imaged, due to its perpetually changing surface features. The second backdrop of my childhood memories, the inside of my grandmother’s home, functions in exactly this way. Unlike the backyard, with its ever-present climbing-trees and picnic table, my grandmother’s home was a constantly shifting mass of collections, ranging from garden gnomes placed inexplicably indoors, to harmonicas and war medals whose presence I never questioned, but I suppose must have belonged to the grandfather I never met.
         One of my fondest childhood memories is waking up before my grandmother and rushing out into her living room, before the drapes had been pulled open and the lights had been turned on. In the mornings, the light from the sun would push its way through the orange drapes that hung over the windows, looking like the honey which my grandmother would pour into her tea. My grandmother refrigerated her honey. It poured more slowly that way, but my grandmother was endowed with the graceful patience that only senescence can bring. The combination of the slowly meandering honey light with the wood paneled walls and the orange carpet would cause the entire room to relent to the tasty orange glow of the morning sun. Years after I had left my grandmother’s home, the image of that room stayed with me. I often imagined my grandmother serenely drinking her morning tea; her living room caramelized with the orange glow of the filtered sunlight; a glow so different than the fiery one that would finally take her and what remained of my childhood away.
It was as a result of this more violent glow that I found myself once more at this spot where I had assembled with my building blocks the worlds I dreamed of visiting and at which my grandmother never scoffed. Grace is not the only change that senescence bring. Senility, the ironic and yet fitting return from a mind full of experience to the innocence of childhood had left my grandmother prone, oblivious to the fact that perhaps the oven was left on or the wood stove left with it’s creaky hatch open.
         My sincere hope is that she did not wake as the fire ravaged her home and her body. To imagine that my grandmother’s last feelings were confusion and shame at her own mistake is too much for me to bear. This angry glow that had engulfed her living room for the last time had not acquiesced to the familiar and gentle blue light of the late morning and open drapes, but had instead charred the familiar landscape, leaving only black, a stench of ash and the metal framework for the ancient furniture she had so immaculately maintained amidst the chaos of her own collections.
         In the distance, I could see the ugly new houses staring smugly at the ruins of my world. Their modern construction so arrogantly praised its own careful design, nursing the knowledge that such a disaster could never happen to them. Silently, they mocked the smoldering architecture of a time gone by, their inhabitants mostly asleep and unaware that they lived in the stead of forests that no standing structure remembered. Behind them, the unclimbed hills sadly looked upon me, and they filled me with shame. Those hills would remain unclimbed, and I could never again hope to see the shifting surfaces of Io.