Voenix Rising

It’s strange where your mind wanders when you find yourself wide awake at 3:30 in the morning. Fuckin’ insomnia.

Until they relocated to Arizona in 1972, every other year my maternal grandparents would fly my mother, sister, and I back east to spend the summer with them on their 22 acre property in western Massachusetts.

And by “the summer,” I mean about two and a half months—a period of time that as an adult passes in the blink of an eye: ten weeks, five paychecks. But to a child, two and a half months was a lifetime.

Those summers were idyllic times for me, starting with the incredible excitement of flying across country. This was obviously long before you had to submit to a rectal probe to be allowed past the gate; when people actually dressed up to get on an airplane. Hell, the first couple times we flew jetways weren’t even used in Phoenix.

My grandparents lived in what felt like the middle of nowhere. Their closest neighbor literally lived a mile away, it was a 45 minute drive to the nearest hospital, and “going into town” to pick up mail at the post office, or buy groceries, or take the week’s trash to the dump always seemed an adventure in itself. In addition to the 230-year old house and rambling barn that seemed to go on forever, the property had a running stream and pond, two enormous fields (that were leased out for cultivation), and several acres of completely undisturbed forest.

Many nights were spent on the home’s screened porch; a magical place where I learned to play Solitaire with my grandmother, built plastic models, put puzzles together, and drew and wrote stories.

Every night my grandmother would read to us. Children’s classics like Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh and The Jungle Book were all on tap.

It was there that I discovered the joys of Pepperidge Farm cookies (at the time only available on the east coast), my love of seafood—especially lobster—and the practice of using half-and-half on my cereal instead of milk. To this day, in my mind there’s no more comforting breakfast than a bowl of corn flakes with fresh peach slices drenched in half-and-half. Toward the end of the summer (always marking our sad, eventual departure and the return to the reality of school and Phoenix) we would gather fresh wild blueberries and enjoy homemade blueberry muffins and blueberry pie.

My grandfather was an accomplished woodworker, and in my mind, he could build anything. I still have a “work table” he built for me one one of our first trips back east:

The last summer we visited before they moved to Arizona, I was obsessed with Lost in Space, and enlisted Grandad’s help in building a “life-size” model of the LIS robot. He was very accommodating, but while I initially started off actively engaged in the construction, being a kid I eventually grew bored and spent more and more time wandering off, exploring the rest of the barn. The place was  chock-full of all manner of intriguing things, leading to me eventually being called out in no uncertain terms by my grandmother; the one time in memory I can ever remember seeing her genuinely angry.  From that point forward, I stayed in the workshop—assisting where I could—until the project was completed.

While the final product actually ended up bearing only a passing resemblece the original (I’m not posting photos; they’re on a hard drive in the other room and I’m not waking Ben up to get it.) and because of an initial miscommunication it slid sideways instead of front to back, I was quite amazed that we managed to pull it off at all. It’s amazing what a loving grandfather can do with a bit of wood, plaster, and several feet of chicken wire. When my grandparents moved to Arizona, they actually brought the thing with them, but by that time I was “all grown up” and in high school—totally embarrassed at the way it looked—so it lived at the back of our garage until I finally disposed of it a couple years later.

The only real downside to these northeastern getaways was my grandparents’ dog: a feisty gray poodle they’d acquired shortly after my family got ours. The disposition of the two animals could not have been more different. Our poodle was affectionate; theirs was an aggressive hellhound. I still have the scars on my right hand where the little beast attacked me one evening as I kissed my grandmother goodnight. When the little monster died years later, I did not shed a single tear.

My sister and I have often talked about flying back east to see how the place has changed; I have found it on Google Maps, and while there’s no street view yet available I’ve seen enough to know that memories are best left in the past. The property has apparently been subdivided with two new houses built in the aforementioned fields. The barn has been torn down and rebuilt, and a second garage seems to have been added onto the house. So yeah, as much as I might like to make the pilgrimage, the fact is I think I’d much rather just keep my memories intact of the place that left such an indelible impression on my young life.