Watching Kezzie’s hands as she played, making piles of books and other things, dressing and undressing dolls, and helping “fold” the laundry as only a toddler can, I thought about how we grow and learn and age and about how the reflections of preceding generations are ever-present in our children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews.
Hearing Kezzie say Yia Yia so clearly was like a clarion call to my childhood, and to our own daughters’ childhoods as well, for they called my mother Yia Yia. Hearing it as a greeting to me holds a special place. You know, that place where one’s heart surely melts. It brought forth such warm thoughts of my grandmother. She’s been on my mind lately, growing like a freshly watered seed since I wrote about the gristmill. That writing got me thinking about the gristmill at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. The very same inn that inspired Longfellow’s’ tales. Funny how thoughts meld together in strains of memories, isn’t it?
This mill is impressive with its massive stone walls and millstones, no longer employed in the grinding of meal, imbedded firmly in the ground. The Graue Mill does the same thing with their retired millstones. I wonder why.
My grandmother would often sit in a chair in her room at the front of our house. The window faced the street with a view of the corner as well as our driveway. As we came home from school, she could see us coming. If a car pulled up with a visitor, she was often the first to know. The reflection of the world outside dappled upon the window panes with the warmth of home resting inside. Yia Yia was the all-knowing sentinel of our little brick fortress in the suburbs of Chicago.
She was also the enforcer of rules and regulations.
She used her wedding ring; a simple gold band.
Yia Yia’s hands were small and rarely idle . I was often told that I had my grandmother’s hands. I wore them, still do, thank goodness, with pride. It’s an honor to have inherited my grandmother’s hands.
My yia yia would sit in her chair in her room and watch the traffic, neighbors walking by, children playing, seasons turning, and she cast an eagle’s eye on her children and grandchildren. A ball thrown into her flowers would bring a tap of her ring finger against the glass. We all knew the sound and its meaning. Too much teasing and arguing, a rap on the glass. Digging a hole where a hole shouldn’t be, a rap on the glass with her ring finger. Try it. It has a distinctive sound.
My father was shoveling snow in the great Chicago snowstorm of 1967. Oh, how hard she rapped her ring finger against the frosty pane! My father looked up from his task and she motioned him in. A grown man with children of his own, already middle-aged, he immediately stopped and heeded his mother. A good thing. Yia Yia could see his ears turning color and saved him from frostbite!
Ah, the reflections we find in a window pane. The voices we hear in the next generation that echo those of our past. The turn of the wheel of life. I’ve always had a fascination with hands, born, I suppose, from my grandmother’s hand tapping the windowpane.
Yia Yia. Keziah. Busy hands and window panes. The grist in the mill of life.
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So it was on Friday night. We were perched on director’s chairs at a coveted outcropping of rock near the old gristmill at Fullersburg Woods. We dined al fresco on a simple dinner of turkey, brie and apple sandwiches, rounded out with a fresh fruit salad.
looking for a meal of his own before swooping majestically across the creek to a podium he claimed his own.
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