It’s 2,309 miles and several worlds away from my current home in Santa Monica, California to the small, two-story house on the corner of Pine Street and Lakeview Avenue in New Boston, Ohio – a once-prosperous, acrid-smoke-belching steel mill town now lapsed into a social, economic, and municipal depression. It’s been over thirty years since I’ve been in that home, but memory is a powerful tool for reaching places and people long gone. And so, as I write this, in my mind I am not sitting in the buttery leather desk chair gifted to me by my wife for my birthday last week, but on a wooden swing with a hand-quilted seat cushion on the back porch of my grandmother’s house at 4301 Pine Street. I am there because I need to be, because that porch holds a story I need to tell.
To understand the significance of that particular porch, it’s important to know that my life as a child was primarily not in New Boston – which seemed like the “big city” to me – but thirty-five miles away in Peebles, Ohio, a town of roughly seventeen hundred people surrounded by Appalachian foothills and rolling farmland. Peebles had only two streetlights, no chain stores or restaurants -- not even a McDonald’s -- and no bookstore or movie theater. However, there were a dozen mostly-Protestant churches squeezed inside its tiny, one-square-mile area of incorporation, a clear indication of the community’s priorities. The house I shared with my father, stepmother, and a diminishing number of five older siblings and a younger half-sister, was located in the middle of town. My three eldest siblings graduated high school and moved on to bigger worlds. I was left to watch, a voiceless and uninformed observer, as the two remaining siblings above me made their way through their teenage years in ways that often confused and deeply frightened me. Both left home for periods of time, and I was offered no clear explanation for where they’d gone. By the age of nine I was the eldest child at home, providing physical and emotional shelter to my four year-old half-sister. She and I would crouch in my bedroom while downstairs my father and stepmother would engage in thunderous, vicious arguments, with one or both of them often attempting to rearrange the house -- one hurled lamp, skillet, or ashtray at a time.
To survive, I sought any source of fun or distraction. I played every available sport, participated in Scouting, played trumpet and drums in the band, acted in plays… any reason not to be at home. Music became an essential emotional lifeline. In a town where rock and country music provided the soundtrack for most folks, I was almost supernaturally drawn to Stevie Wonder, John Coltrane, and the Crusaders -- records given to me by my eldest brother on a rare visit. Those albums gave me a strange, almost unidentifiable sense of hope as I holed up in my room with my plastic, portable General Electric record player and let the music transport me. But these things were only salve on wounds that cut to my heart, things I lacked the age and wisdom to comprehend.
In an attempt to find some deeper understanding, as a young boy I would often walk on my own to the nearby Church of Christ, or get a ride from elderly neighbors to Brush Creek Baptist Church, deep in the countryside, hoping some combination of God or Jesus or faith or repentance for my sins could help me. But nothing reached the inexpressible pain and void inside me.
The closest I came to experiencing any deep comfort or joy was the one week every summer of my youth that I got to spend at my grandmother’s house. Everything about her and her home was magical to me, my version of Disneyland. There were no rides, shows, or costumed characters, but it was clean. There were no piles of dirty dishes. The air was fresh, unlike the perpetual clouds of cigarette smoke and sadness that hung in my own house. Grandma would greet me at the door with a huge smile, drawing me into her tiny, 5’ tall, 95 lb. frame with a hug she would only reluctantly end because she had to tend to something on the stove.
She would lead me through the kitchen -- aromatic with the smell of pot roast or meatloaf or fried chicken -- and out to the adjacent back porch. She would join me on the swing once she’d stirred, turned, or basted whatever she was cooking. She’d put her hand on my arm, my body almost shuddering at the unfamiliar warmth of human touch. We’d gently swing for a few moments and talk about baseball, one of our shared passions… how my Little League team and the Cincinnati Reds were doing that summer. She’d then slip back into the kitchen, whistling her favorite song as she made skillet-fried cornbread, her specialty. I’d breathe in the incredible smells wafting through the screen door and exhale with relief to finally be there.
That week would be filled with good food at every meal (at home I’d be lucky to get one prepared meal a day, often a box of Hamburger Helper or a can of Beefaroni). After dinner, we’d move onto the porch for slow and easy conversation. We’d laugh at everything. She’d bring out juicy peaches from her native Georgia or exotic, dark chocolate-coated ice cream bars for dessert. One evening that week, she’d lean in as if she was passing on top secret information, slip me ten dollars, and ask me to walk three blocks to “get us some of that good chicken” at KFC. In the morning, we’d walk to Bluebird Bakery for fresh donuts made by her best friend, Bessie Newberry. We’d climb on the small, clean, green city bus and make the short trip into nearby Portsmouth, and enter the fantasyland of Marting’s, a large and beautiful department store. At night, I’d sleep long and deep on crisp, clean sheets, under one of the hundreds of handsewn quilts Grandma made over decades. On Wednesday evenings, we’d walk just a few doors down Pine Street to Immanuel Baptist Church, where she’d been attending services three times a week for over fifty years.
I felt like a visiting child star in that church. The small congregation was comprised primarily of couples in their sixties and seventies, many of them Grandma’s lifelong friends. I’d get enthusiastic hugs and smiles amidst waves of perfume. Some would say things like “oh, this is Ima’s baby,” “this is the miracle child,” “your Mama was the smartest person I’ve ever known,” or “nobody could play the piano like your mother.” They were clues to my past, to my identity, to the vast hole in my spirit, but I was simply too young to understand.
I have to pause here and admit, as I wrote that last paragraph, I began to fight back tears. There’s an overwhelming knot in my throat, because I now comprehend what that time with my Grandma truly was. Yes, I got to experience things in otherwise short supply in my life… food, care, comfort, peace, love. But, more significantly, it was a reconnection to what I’d lost as a child before I was old enough to have even formed a memory of it… more specifically, of her.
The story has been passed down to me in pieces over many years. My mother, known as “Ima” -- the third of my Grandma’s five children -- had five children of her own, living just a few doors from Grandma’s house at 4301 Pine, the house in which my mother herself was raised. Mama discovered she was pregnant with her sixth child. At the same time, she was told she had breast cancer, which had metastasized throughout her body. She would be physically incapable of bearing a child and had only a few months to live. The story goes that Mama – stubborn, incredibly intelligent, musically-gifted – made the choice to essentially stiff-arm those doctors and found another that would help her have the child. Defying expectations, Mama carried me to term and I was born healthy in every way. Soon after, Mama went back into the hospital to begin cancer treatment. She came home for a last, short visit at Christmas. There is a final photo of me with her; she is pale and gaunt, wearing a hospital bracelet and gown, sitting at our kitchen table. I am standing in front of her, my hand extended toward her, reaching for her as I have been throughout my life. She died two months later, at age thirty-eight. I was sixteen months old.
I can now grasp that the trauma, the sadness, the extreme dysfunction of my childhood was direct, collateral damage from her loss. Unable to cope with her death and the memory of her sewn into the fabric of her hometown, my dad – who lost his own mother when he was seven years old -- abruptly remarried, uprooted the family, and moved to Peebles. It was an avalanche of catastrophically bad decisions. Everyone was forbidden to mention Mama. Every memory of her was wiped from our lives. As a result, everything that happened around me – including my siblings’ attempts at self-destruction -- seemed inexplicable, random, unpredictable. And it was impossible for me to identify my chronic feeling of emptiness. As painful as it was and sometimes still is, it now makes sense. It is what happens when grief and loss are silenced, buried, until they inevitably explode to the surface.
Grandma brought me as close to my Mama, her daughter, as I could ever get. She cared for me as she had for my mother, and in the same house. There were photos of my mother on her walls, smiling, vibrant, full of life. She existed. Out of respect for my stepmother, Grandma rarely talked about Mama to me, but she said two things I remember. During one meal, she reached across the table, put her hand on top of mine, and said “you have your Mama’s musical hands.” On another occasion I was reading, and she said “with your head down like that, you look just like your Mama.” Having never had the experience of seeing myself reflected in my mother, it gave me a small, but lasting sense of that connection, something I so desperately needed.
Grandma also delivered to me an enduring message about dealing with loss. Her husband, my grandfather, died of a heart attack at age fifty-nine, just three months before my mother passed. She also lost two of her three sons to early deaths. Yet she was one of the most joyful spirits I’ve ever known. How? I could see she fought for what she believed in, as did my Mama, as I have done too. But there was more, even beyond her religious faith, which I now share less as an adult. It was in the song she whistled every single day, that carried through the screen door and out onto the porch. I knew the words, even if she wasn’t singing them… “Farther along we’ll know more about it. Farther along, we’ll understand why.”
I am coming to understand why things were as they were when I was child, and how that resonated into my adult life. It’s taken me decades. Yet there is so much that eludes me, including how I now have a life of such beauty and bounty, including a wife, children, and friends who genuinely seem to love me. Like my mother, I have exceeded expectations. At this point, there is still no answer for why I and my family experienced such a loss, for why my siblings and I still rarely talk about any of it, for why I’ve spent my entire life profoundly missing someone I can’t even remember. But for now, when I need it, I can return in my mind to that porch swing, hear my Grandma whistling, feel my Mama’s presence there, and find some peace in the hope that somehow, farther along, I may know more about it.
Trent Jones is a writer based in Santa Monica. This essay is adapted from the upcoming memoir entitled How Am I Here?
