Ok, here it is, I told myself this would be a practical (and definitely never EMO) website/blog/thing and a week goes by and my grandma's house goes and blows up one night and I'm feeling all emo and bloggy. Sorry. I'll try to keep it short.So that picture on the right is my grandma's house in Council Bluffs, IA. Apparently it spontaneously combusted yesterday. No one was home - no one was hurt - which is good of course and lets me wallow in my sense of loss about never being able to revisit this house (and my childhood). I miss my grandma, who passed away less than a month after Otto was born and who never got to meet him. She would have loved him. She would have sung, "You Are My Sunshine" to him and stroked his eyebrows and eventually asked him to tell her his 'innermost secrets'...
I remember sitting in the living room of grandma's house on Christmas Eves watching the sky for Santa Claus until I fell asleep. I remember backyard bbqs and catching fireflies and making giant dishsoap bubbles. It's where we went for trick-or-treating. I even fondly remember eating my grandma's disgusting salty spaghetti, riddled with onions and stewed tomato chunks, that always made me gag and get accused of fake-gagging, but those gags were real. My aunt taught me how to slurp the noodles so all the disgusting stuff just ended up on your face (thanks Aunt Marcia).
I think with the weird, sudden passing of this house (that will someday probably be something my family kind of laughs about because it's so bizarre: "Remember that time Grandma's house exploded?" ) that it just dawned on me that I don't get to go back to all of those wonderful childhood memories that are so pure. It's gone. And it very suddenly drives home that fact that my grandma's gone too. I didn't really get a chance to say goodbye to her; I had a newborn and was so far away, maybe it didn't seem real until today.
So here's to you, grandma's house, you were the keystone of my childhood. When everything else was crazy and I didn't feel at home at my own house, I always felt at home at grandma's. You were small and had an unfortunately long and narrow living room and way too steep stairs to the basement. I loved you and I'll miss you and I'm really sad that you blew up.
-Lindsey
