C’est Deja Novembre?

The first birthday I remember, I must have been about three. I don’t remember details, only that I got up very early — before my parents knew I was awake (though I think they were both awake and busy. I don’t remember.)
I remember going through the still house — it was a brief excursion, since at the time we lived in a railroad-appartment (for the unitiated, that’s an appartment where the rooms follow one another in a row. Long and thin. One room thin, though we did have a large hallway which accomodated my brother’s trundle bed) carved out of my paternal grandparents’ larger house. (I understand they converted the store rooms to accomodate my parents.) One door faced the street, the other door faced to the back patio (which was no wimpy suburban patio, but more substantial. A working patio, almost a farmhouse patio, floored in broad paving stones and surrounded on the two sides flanking the house by my grandfather’s workshop, the shed and the chicken coups. The one open side faced a bed of calla lillies and a broad backyard which was itself surrounded by grapevines.) Both doors had glass panels which provided the only natural daylight in the house. Since we lived in the kitchen, that back door was open almost all the time we were awake. (I used to dream of living in a house with windows, as weird as that sounds. I never outgrew my wish for “a lot of windows.”)
That day, November… 1965? was so cold that the back door was closed. I opened it and looked out.
There was a whisp of wood smoke in the air and the fog shrouded the yard and gave it a dream-like quality. I don’t remember why — perhaps because it was the first time I’d woken up, dressed myself, and was out there on my own? — but the day had a quality of wonder and marvel.
My grandmother was in the yard, splitting wood for the franklin stove. I don’t know how long I stood at that door, watching her work. I remember feeling love for her and more importantly feeling protected and happy at her love for me. I remember the fog cool on my face. I remember the smell of burning wood.

There have been other birthdays since — forty five of them. I’m now markedly closer to the age my grandmother was then than to three. Or four. Or ten. As an adult, I can now appreciate how extraordinary it was that she was doing that work at … she had to be more than sixty, with neither complaint nor any signs of weekness. What is much harder to remember or accept: my grandmother has been dead eighteen years. I have sons who, I think, depend on me the way I depended on her.

But in my mind, I’m still standing there, my hand on that green kitchen door, looking out with new eyes at a world full of wonder and magic and the one woman who — more than any other (though my mother is formidable in her own right) — molded me into who I am.