Gramma's Stairs

WHENEVER WE VISITED GRAMMA AND GRAMPA, there were always a lot of aunts, uncles and cousins visiting as well. The place was a hive of activity, both inside and outside.

The kitchen was a hub of flurry.

My uncles and Grampa monopolized the kitchen table with their card games. Smoke hung in the kitchen the way it hung in the dreary Detroit sky. Shot glasses and ashtrays littered the table.

My aunts and Gramma busied themselves cooking, baking and doing dishes. Skillets sputtered on the stove. Oven doors screeched. Fridge doors thumped. Pots and cookie sheets clattered in the sink. The back door banged shut regularly enough that Gramma gave up yelling, “Keep that door locked!” The banter between the men and the women was nonstop, ranging from barely audible whispers to ear-spitting guffaws. What a cacophony!

Gramma’s back stairs was always a major draw to my cousins and me. We were not allowed to be on them. If we were caught nearing them, we were shooed away. They were situated in the rear corner of the kitchen between the stove and the back door.

The attraction wasn’t the stairs themselves, but what Gramma stored on the third step up: a large jar of her cookies. The trick for us became making it through the bustle of the kitchen unnoticed, then sneaking through the door that separated the stairs from the kitchen. When there was a lot happening, this was a fairly easy task. But when it was only Gramma and Grampa in the kitchen and things were quiet, this short trek was nearly impossible. They always caught us heading toward the cookies.

“Danny,” called Gramma as I neared the stairs, “Was machst Du? Why don’t you go play in the front room. You don’t need to be in the kitchen.” Grampa held back a chuckle.

Deflated but undaunted, I left the kitchen. I headed for the front room but kept going. I ran out the front door, around the house, and tested the back kitchen door. Surprisingly, it was unlocked! I raced back around to the front room to fetch Katie-Ann, my soon-to-be partner-in-crime.

“The back door’s unlocked?” she asked, as astonished as I was that Gramma would have left it unlocked.

We raced round the house and up the back steps, quietly opened the back door and slid inside. We stealthily moved toward the stairs, keeping out of sight.

“Ma,” called Grampa over his newspaper, “did you hear that? Sounded like the back door.”

“Can’t be, Pa,” she answered. “It’s locked. But I’ll check it. Can’t be too safe.”

Our eyes nearly bugged out of our heads. As fast as we could we slipped undetected into the stairwell. Katie-Ann and I congratulated ourselves with cookie after cookie.

In the kitchen, Gramma and Grampa smiled at one another as they mentally contrived new cookie barriers for future visits.

A Hole of My Own

WHEN MA DIED, I went underground. I needed to be by myself. I needed to sort things out. So I dug a hole and crawled inside.

I couldn’t stand all the somber people and their empty words.

“Oh, Danny. I’m so sorry.”

“How are you doin’?”

“You help your dad now.”

I didn’t even know these well-intended swarms. Before the funeral they infested the house — ladies cooking and cleaning, men gathering in the den smoking and drinking. Lots of whispers and sidelong glances. I was suddenly a stranger in my own home, moving through a bad dream I couldn’t wake from.

The day of the funeral Lu came home from New Jersey. Aunts and uncles and cousins came. Grandma and Grandpa came, too. I was glad to finally see familiar faces with sincere smiles, to find some warm arms to lose myself in. But they all left as soon as we buried Ma.

The days following the funeral were silent. No one talked. Not a word. Since Dad broke the news, Jay-bird became my shadow. He wouldn’t leave my side. He was as lost as I was.

But I didn’t care. I needed to be by myself.

Not even Jay-bird was paying attention when I grabbed the shovel and raced to the river. There was a spot high on the cliffs where I liked to sit and sketch. I could see the dam to my left and the bridge to my right. Below, the rapids foamed white in the fast-moving, muddy-brown water. This was where I started to dig.

I dug and I dug. I dug until my back hurt and my arms ached. Then I dug some more. When I ran into roots too big to slice through, I snuck home and got the saw to cut them out.


Down, down I dug.

My hole became a tunnel. My tunnel, a hide-away. My hide-away, a sanctuary — dark, damp and earthy smelling. I spent the night there with Reuben, and no one noticed — not Dad, not Annie, not Paddy or Bull. Not even Jay-bird. After we buried Ma, nothing was ever the same again.

A Classroom Visitation

“Good morning, girls and boys,” said the delicate, snowy-haired lady. She traversed the front of the classroom, fading in and out of the morning sunlight that punctuated the long blackboard.

“My name is Mrs. Artemisia Blount Walton and I’m visiting from Sheperd, Michigan, where I lived for 73 years,” she said. “I am 97 years old and am the oldest pioneer in the county. Sheperd lies in Isabella County, smack dab in the middle of the Michigan mitten.”

She raised her left hand, palm facing away from the students, and with her right, pointed to the spot just above her left hand’s middle knuckle, the place where Shepherd would be.


“When I was twenty-four years old I married John Billings Walton. He was a strapping young man with a furious head of auburn hair and a woolly beard to match. He had recently acquired 160 acres of land for $80.00 in the wilderness of Isabella County. So, as a young bride, Billings moved me from my parents’ home in Troy into the wildernss. We set out in a wagon pulled by oxen, over tortuous trails, and arrived nearly two weeks later at the log cabin he had built for me.”

“Maybe she’s related to Abraham Lincoln,” heckled a boy in the back.

But she continued, oblivious of the comment.

“The cabin was in the middle of a great forest; it had one room, a large stone fireplace, and a simple dirt floor. Our nearest neighbors were miles away and hard to reach. The closest post office was in St. Johns, a day’s journey to the south. There were many bears, wolves and Indians in the woods. We hauled our water from the nearby Salt River.”

Mrs. Walton stepped from a bright ray, disappearing momentarily into the classroom’s dark shadows.

“With our oxen, we began clearing land,” she continued. “Little by little, the level patch surrounding our cabin grew larger and larger. Within three years we had cleared enough land to build a one-room schoolhouse. Pupils came from far and wide, walking miles on Indian trails to attend. I earned $1.50 a week for teaching back then.

“In 1863 Billings entered the service during the Rebellion. I had two little children at that time, but managed to maintain the farmstead as well as teach while Billings was off fighting. In June the following year, Billings survived the Battle of the Wilderness only to be shot in his left hand at the battle of Petersburg. He was taken to Harwood Hospital in our nation’s capitol, but was transferred to Haddington in Philadelphia where his little finger was amputated. Billings was luckier than most other soldiers — he returned home after the war with only a finger missing.

“We had four more children after that. Our youngest son, Willard, was the great-granddad of your own classmate, Danny Powers.”

Everyone’s heads turned to look at me in disbelief as she continued.

“Billings died in 1879 and is buried in Salt River Cemetery,” she said wistfully. “I’m buried right next to him.”

Heads shot back around to the front of the class just in time to see Mrs. Walton fade from sight as she stepped out of the bright morning sunshine.