This is one of those times of year when you tend to think a lot about family.

Stones of Heart

The house was already about sixty years old when my grandparents bought it in the 1950s. Papaw transformed the little place. He added onto it, modernized it, and covered it with masonry. Even with the additions it was not large. But its harmonious proportions, carefully-crafted brickwork, and situation atop a hill made it a pleasant-looking home.

I saw a lot of that house from the time I was four. That year, a year or so after Papaw’s death, our family moved to a ptown about half an hour from Nannie’s house. We visited her often—on Saturdays, when Mom took us along on her grocery-shopping expeditions to the county seat; in the evening, when the whole family went to see her; during two summers, when Mom needed somebody to serve as a babysitter (we were still too young to work with Dad) while she worked on a Master’s degree at a college in town; and on special occasions, in particular the annual Thanksgiving dinner when all the aunts, uncles, and cousins converged on Nannie’s house.

The main entrance led into Nannie’s den, a smallish, informal room where Nannie did most of her entertaining. It was also where she kept the sewing machine that she used in her work as a seamstress. On summer days she would work at the machine while we kids were largely left to our own devices, to read or play or wander around. Otherwise we played on the floor while the adults visited. Sometimes we were allowed to play on the red chest that stood on one end of the room. Its vaulted lid made it look a bit like a storybook pirate’s chest.

The room had a pair of end tables topped with slabs of speckled imported Italian travertine marble. I recall noticing the cool, hard marble surfaces, but I was more interested in the candy dish on one of the end tables where Nannie kept her peppermints and hard candy. The same end table also had a small drawer that contained a stock of toys for visiting grandchildren. These “play-pretties,” as Nannie called them, included several small toy cars, including a couple made of metal that appeared to be about Dad’s vintage.

Also in the room was a bookcase. It held several volumes of “Reader’s Digest Condensed Books,” several late 1960s-early 1970s issues of “Reader’s Digest,” a nice old hardcover edition of Pilgrim’s Progress, and other items that came and went over the years. There were also lots of photos of all the children and grandchildren. It was a bit startling to see what Dad and his brothers and sisters had looked like long ago.

A short hallway led from the den, past the bathroom, to a back bedroom. The bathroom was long and narrow and had been created by walling in a section of the bedroom. This left the room rather small and oddly shaped. It had once served as a crowded room for Dad and his two brothers. I remember it as “Grandmother’s room,” “Grandmother” being Nannie’s own mother who had come to live with her. Grandmother was in her seventies when I was born, a product of a very different world from anything I could readily imagine as a child. I wish that I had had the chance to know her earlier, and had gotten to know her better.

The hallway contained a telephone table and a picture of the Crucifixion. It was designed so that if you took a step backward it suddenly became an image of the Resurrection instead. The optical illusion was mind-blowing for a child.

A doorway beside the telephone table led into the kitchen. Though small, it contained two tables. These had had to be pushed up close to the walls to make any free space for circulation through the room. One had just enough space between it and the wall for children to slip through and sit down. This was naturally where we smaller kids ate. On the wall above us hung Nannie’s collection of souvenir plates from all over the country. As a teenager I added to the collection when I went to Washington, D.C. with a delegation from our high school.

Nannie’s bedroom opened onto the kitchen. We only rarely got to look in there. She had more family photos in the room, including a shot of Papaw in his Army uniform. She kept another relic of service in the form of a souvenir Japanese samurai sword he had brought back from his postwar visit to Japan, carefully wrapped in the closet. Its existence fascinated my brother. I got to see the sword unwrapped perhaps twice.

One more door led from the kitchen into the formal living room. This door had a grid of little glass windows going almost from floor to ceiling. It had a missing panel near the bottom. When we approached it on cold evenings, when the living room was closed up, we could feel a blast of cold air coming through the window. As a child I was leery of approaching the closed living room door at night, I suppose for fear that some power of darkness might reach out through the missing window panel and pull me through. It was many years before I learned how the panel had come to be knocked out. Naturally it turned out to have been the result of some horseplay involving the boys of the household.

The living room held the house’s most formal furniture. On the wall hung formal portrait photos of Grandmother in her youth and her first husband, Nannie’s father, who had died in the Great Influenza shortly after World War I. The man I heard talked about as “Grandaddy” had been Nannie’s stepfather. He and Papaw both died when I was too small to have any real memories of them.

The living room had a fireplace where I liked to curl up, like a cat, on cold days during the Christmas season. Niches above the mantel displayed colorful faux-Dresden figurines that had “Made in Occupied Japan” stamped on their bases. When I was still a kid the open fireplace was replaced by a less aesthetically pleasing, but more practical and efficient, wood-burning stove. Cutting a year’s worth of firewood for Nannie was an annual Thanksgiving Day family chore for several years.

A wooden bookcase of very 1950s design contained a set of 1959 World Book encyclopedias. When I was old enough to read them these lavishly-illustrated books did indeed open up a whole world to me. I would spend hours browsing through them when I got the chance. I was already by then developing a sense of history, and was aware that this old reference set represented a glimpse into what for me was a past age. A lovely color portfolio illustrating the entry on “Painting” was for many years one of my main sources on what great works of art looked like.

One last detail in the living room that caught my attention was the sills of the two windows that looked out over the back yard. They were just about the right height for a child my age to examine carefully. They were made of a dark, veined marble, highly polished and always cold to the touch. It never occurred to me when I examined them that this marble was unusually fine for such a modest house.

As an adult I learned the story behind the marble window sills. In the 1950s Winthrop Rockefeller—of THE Rockefeller family—came to Arkansas and built an experimental agricultural station called Winrock Farms atop Mount Petit Jean. Papaw and a couple of his relatives spent weeks living up there—it was too far from home to commute—in order to do much of the project’s masonry work. The main house incorporated a good deal of dark marble. Papaw was able to salvage some leftover pieces of that marble to take home and build into his own home remodeling project. My grandmother’s little house contained Rockefeller marble!

The house and land were a great place to visit as a kid. In back of the house Nannie owned some acres of steep, wooded hills that to a youngster looked almost like miniature mountains. There was even a pond nestled in a wooded hollow. Nannie and Grandmother loved to fish there. Nannie would clean the fish she caught on an old concrete wellhead in the back yard, and cook it up for us.

One day Grandmother fell in. She was past eighty then, and I was terrified that we were about to lose her. But she proved no worse for wear after we had pulled her out.

I saw less and less of Nannie when I reached adulthood, especially after I moved away to go to graduate school. The rare visits that I was able to make when I was back in town were especially good ones. On some of these I got to talk with Nannie one-on-one in a way I’d never done before. She told me family stories I’d not heard—about how she and Papaw had tried unsuccessfully to adopt orphaned children that he had met in Korea during his military service; about Dad’s childhood dog, Spot; about the day Papaw surrendered to preach. What more could I have learned if we had been able to have a few more of these talks?

Late in life Nannie “downsized,” like so many senior citizens. She moved from her house to an assisted-living apartment in town. We continued to visit her there, but the big Thanksgiving gatherings at her house became a thing of the past. The house remained in the family even after her death a decade ago. For a time one of my cousins lived there. The family also rented it to various tenants. I haven’t been inside it since the last family Thanksgiving there.

That might be one reason why I always think of Nannie more around Thanksgiving time. I wouldn’t exactly say that I regret no longer having those Thanksgivings at her house. Nothing on this Earth lasts forever, after all—not people, or houses, or traditions. It’s futile to try to hold onto them. I admit, though, it would be nice, were it possible, to sit in front of Nannie’s hearth again, or to have one of her homemade rolls that nobody ever seems to have duplicated successfully.

The year before last Nannie’s children sold the house. Their decision not to keep it in the family disappointed me, but it was not mine to make. I do understand how awkward it must have been to keep up a place that nobody in the family any longer had a practical use for. I wish that I had known about the impending sale in time to visit the house one last time. Then again, it would not have been much like the place I knew without Nannie there.

A few things from Nannie’s house now reside in mine. The World Book set now sits on a shelf in my den. I still occasionally consult it. A desk that once belonged to Papaw sits in another room. It served for a time as my computer table.

Like Nannie, I have both a den and a formal living room. Four years ago, when I finally got to stop renting and move into a house of my own, Mom and Dad helped me to furnish the living room as a housewarming present. They bought me a sofa and love seat set at a sale in town. And they gave me Nannie’s old end tables.

The first evening that I spent in the new house I was all by myself. Mom and Dad had returned to their own house over two hours away. The weather had turned cloudy and chilly. I huddled in my new den near the gas wall heater and decided to watch a DVD. It was a lovely anime series called “Mushi-shi.” The first episode involves a youth who lives by himself in the country after the death of his grandmother. He learns that she is still there, invisibly watching over him in their family home.

As I watched the story I thought suddenly of those old marble-topped end tables in the next room. I’ve never held with magical thinking and sentimental ideas about deceased loved ones lingering as guardian spirits. They’re well and truly gone, and they’ll be gone until the great day of resurrection that Jesus told his followers to look toward. But there’s no denying the feelings and associations that those things that stay behind when our loved ones move on can hold for us.

I carry Nannie’s memory with me. Now and then since that evening I’ve made a point of touching the cold travertine tops of her end tables, and letting the memory of Nannie and the times spent with her come back to me. It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that these two slabs of stone are dear to me. What touching them brings to mind is another story.

Much as I love my house and its furnishings, I’ve been trying not to become too attached to them. Within a couple of decades—perhaps even sooner than I think—I’ll have to let it all go and move on from it, even as Nannie left behind everything she had when her time came. It wouldn’t do to let these lifeless things hold me back. Still, while I’m here I do get to use them. The end tables still have a bit of practical use, as lamp stands, places to display a few little objects d'art, and small storage units. But my favorite use for them is as conveyors of memory.

This is extremely moving and well written. I enjoyed it.

Watched some "Mushi-shi" just the other evening and was reminded of this. Makes me want to give Nannie's marble tabletops another good touch (Especially since I gave them a good dusting!).

Wonder how this thread has gotten so many hits in just a little over a month? Where do these readers come from, anyway?