All Those Stairs to Grandma’s Apartment

by Linda Carter © 2015

It blew my mind that a little old lady marched up and down this lengthy staircase day after day, sometimes many times a day.  The stairs towered above me as I looked up, toward my Grandmother’s apartment above a plumbing store.

At the top of this lengthy climb lies a long hallway with worn hardwood floors.  My Grandmother’s apartment is the first on the left and I remember seeing that frosted glass door swinging open to a room with high ceilings, an old white gas oven and a double porcelain sink on the right wall.  There are so many surfaces in the room, but they are covered, overflowing with old calendars, daily newspapers, bills, recipes, letters, Green Stamps… I swear she never threw anything away.

Linoleum covers every floor in the apartment and it squeaks under my feet. In the early days of this building, these rooms probably housed a dentist or a doctor’s office. The long narrow living room with high, high ceilings would have made a great waiting area.

At one end of this cavernous room sits a huge stuffed blue couch with sparkling silver threads, a velvet souvenir pillow perched on the cushions. Overhead, a glass etching of the Statue of Liberty in a gold oval frame hangs next to my grandparent’s ornate wedding portrait.

At one end of the room sits my Uncle Cliff, holding court around an antique round dining table with claw feet, a western shirt and blue jeans his wardrobe of choice.

As a child, I sat here quietly, absorbing stories.

Uncle Cliff lights one cigarette after another, crumpling the short filters into the ashtray in front of him. He drinks whiskey and sometimes Christian Brothers Brandy. Uncle Cliff tells fascinating stories and I’m not sure how many are true.

Let’s just say he had to run from cops who caught him in someone else’s pasture and he partied so hearty one time he had to drop trough on the side of the road and change his drawers, literally.

Others dropped in from time to time, my Uncle Herb bringing pop from the gas station and store he owned a few towns away. I didn’t know it at the time, but all these characters and their stories played a large part in who I was to become. 

I was intrigued by words and the tales my family told.

I can still hear the booming, friendly laugh of my Great Aunt Pearl, her white teeth perfectly framed behind the reddest lipstick I have ever seen. She towered above me, a tall woman with a solid frame, but I never feared a moment spent in her shadow. I thought she was colorful, just like this apartment.

The biggest mystery to my child’s brain lay behind a wide doorway that led to the bedroom right off the kitchen. A makeshift curtain droops down the right hand side of the doorway, creating a cave like quality that invites exploration.

A brass bed sits to the right, covered with a fringed bedspread. An old free standing wardrobe takes up much of the left side of the room, filled with clothes and shoes. Beyond the bed, a huge overstuffed closet holds a mountain of clothing and pictures and who knows what. To this day, I wish I could have been allowed to wallow in that mess, finding old stories and souvenirs of days gone by.

The most cluttered room in my Grandma’s apartment was the tiniest. Right off the kitchen stood a narrow door that opened to the bathroom. Just inside sits an ancient claw foot tub, almost invisible with the slips, underwear and other clothing hanging from laundry lines stretched across the room. A red hot water bottle hangs over the end of the tub, a splash of color in a tiny dark space.

I worried about how she bathed and then I remembered how she lived when my Dad was little, settled in an old farmhouse with a pump sink, dust settling into every crevice of home and field, winds destroying dreams as the Great Depression swept over the land and cancer stole her husband.

She lived on Social Security, played cards late into the night and took bus trips around the country to explore history and visit far flung relatives.

She lived a messy life, clutter all around her. And maybe that is her greatest legacy. She knew life didn’t come with any guarantees. She taught me through experience that you can’t always predict or control what happens to you. But you can make do.

THE END