On top of the refrigerator in my kitchen there is a slab of drywall. It is wallpapered, old and yellowing, browned with water damaged around the edges. The wallpaper is patterned with large, blooming red poppies, their leaves and stems curling like filigree. This rough cut piece of wall is more familiar to me than I can truly comprehend. The pattern is a deep and warm memory. As far back as I can recall, this wallpaper covered my great grandmother’s kitchen. The yellowing of the paper has most likely been there since my mother was young and ate her dinners here, but in the darkness of my Nani’s kitchen it was impossible to discern how long ago it had been up. The pattern is dated, like most everything in her home, but took on the label of “Nani’s house” over “dated” in my mind. Everything she owned seemed to be so singularly of her. It was comforting to be there.

I never felt the impatience at her home that I often felt when out with my mother. I can remember trips to the store, out clothing shopping with my sisters, only thinking about getting home to play with my neighbor’s kittens or make birds’ nests out of mud and lawn clippings. I hated to be away from home. Perhaps my sisters may call my bluff on that statement, as I was often “running away from home” and more than once was successful enough to have the police called regarding my disappearance. Still, I remember that knot in my stomach and the uncomfortable feeling of true anxiety when my mother would bring me along on outings. I did not like to be places where my escape routes and hiding spots weren’t known. My Nani’s house was an extension of home. I knew her house and its yard. I knew the rhododendrons by the sidewalk and the Concord grapes by the backdoor. I knew the playground across the street and the shady, wooded area behind it, which covered all of thirty square feet but seemed like a dark and foreboding forest when I was six. I can recall sitting at the kitchen table with Nani, my mother, and my older sisters, completely enthralled, hoping that the sun would stay up and my mother would forget that we had to go home. I would sit and listen, captured by all the names of these people who were somehow linked to me by blood but whom I had never met, hearing about their lives, and seeing my mother’s relationship with the woman who raised her, so palpable and tender. The idea of growing up to be like them seemed unattainable. I viewed them as separate entities all together. Even as I grew older, it seemed unlikely that I would ever become a woman like my mother or my great grandmother. They gave love, guidance and support where it was needed, while I was the one who needed that love and guidance and support. They had answers where I had questions and deep, rattling uncertainty. How could I come to be a woman who gives assurance?

As I have grown, these feelings have become surmountable. It has not been easy nor did it come naturally or without notice. It was not gradual, perhaps not even a natural progression. I have been acutely aware of this part of me that does not have answers. It is a part of me which I felt for a long time should have or needed to have them. My mother and my great grandmother might as well have been mythical creatures for all the relating I could do to them. What seemed second nature to them was vast and unknown. Just like leaving my home at six to brave a department store, the world of adulthood and the mere idea of motherhood left a knot in my stomach. Where are my exits? How do I turn back? That retreat was not possible was a stark reality.

Yet there was a seed inside that contained the knowledge I felt I so desperately needed. How do I nurture and love? Where is the blueprint for building a family? In all those Sundays spent on Lynde Street, willing the sun to stay hovering at the horizon, all of the quiet moments watching my grandmother do crosswords in her sunroom, all the songs and sayings told to me when crying and scared with skinned knees and bee stings. The mothers of my life gave me the answers I thought for so long I didn’t have. Even with their mistakes, I have been taught how to nurture and love and guide.

My great grandmother passed away four years ago this October. That is when the house was sold, and my sister and her husband snuck inside before its demolition and cut pieces of the kitchen wall out. Things change. And that’s ok. We all have fixtures in life. We love these things we know so well. We learn that with loving and knowing comes the sadness of loss, and all of this learning and knowing and losing shapes us into people worth getting to know – worth having, holding, loving and losing.