So fresh, so clean
When I was a child, my grandmother always had a bar of this soap in the soap dish at her house. I spent all the summers of my childhood in that small house in South Carolina with my seven other cousins and my sister. Somehow, she kept all of our bright black minds occupied for three months every year. She kept us clean with this soap.
I saw Grandmother two weeks ago. She is so frail now, a small, brittle reminder of those juicy summers past. Her skin like delicate paper, but underneath it remains high-minded cheekbones, a sharp nose with large nostrils perched on either side, small pink lips sitting like a bow on a smoothly wrapped package. And those eyes. Bright, smiling with intensity.
I look exactly like her to the point that I see her in photographs from the 1950s, a young minister’s wife, kindergarten teacher and mother. And in the still of the grainy black-and-white photos, I see myself. Like I have traveled back in time. Like even I would mistake me for this woman.
Because of our resemblance, I always liked to think that I was her favorite grandchild. It was all I had to hold onto. I am the fifth of all her grandkids, right smack in the middle of them all, and for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I always felt odd. Believing that she somehow favored me, for whatever small genetic coincidence, helped calm me when I struggled to fit in and feel loved by everyone. I am impressed at how as an adult this would even matter, but it does. Above her kitchen sink, taped to a cabinet door is a drawing I made when I was probably four years old. I wrote my name on the picture, but it is misspelled because I was just that young. That this image has remained above her sink for more than 30 years, and there are no others, comforts me every time I see it.
