The judea tree

I used google maps to see a satellite picture of my hometown. Sure enough there was a clear photograph of my parents' house on a sunny winter day. Their car was parked in the driveway.

There was another clear picture of my grandparents' house. I looked for a sign of them but google erases people from its map pics. My daughter redirected the view to their backyard. I could see the blue trashcan by the kitchen door and my grandmother's tree.

She called it her "judea tree" although I think it was a sumac which never grew tall because of the climate. It was also the only tree we were not allowed to climb, which was a shame because its small stature and twisty limbs would have turned it into a perfect playground. Its leaves turned bright red in the fall and its trunk was velvety.

Margo had planted the tree in the front part of the garden that was reserved for her flowers. She grew flowers the way other people grew carrots and peas: in neat parallel rows separated by wooden planks. Dahlias, gladiolas, asters, roses, daisies for the dining room vase. The Judea tree was the only ornamental plant in the garden. Its sacredness came from its name and its mysterious provenance. Margo was the only one in the neighborhood to own suchtree and she was mysterious about where the cutting had come from.

I had been worried about what would happen to the tree once the new owners moved into the house. The satellite picture seems to indicate it is alive and well. Protected, as always.

The lie

On Wednesday mornings, Margo and I would go to the 'Bibliotheque Pour Tous', the two-room Catholic library were she volunteered as a cashier.

By the time I entered the sixth grade, I had read the entire children section of the library and requested access to the adult room. Margo discussed the matter with my mother and it was agreed that I would only borrow from the literature section. Romance would give me the wrong ideas about marriage and Margo believed that people who read mystery novels were doomed to meet an untimely death.

My first adult book was a biography of Edith Piaf that my mother read first, pinning together the pages of any inappropriate sections with her sewing pins. I un-pinned and re-pinned those sections in the privacy of our family bathroom, learning about Piaf's early childhood in a brothel, the untimely death of her baby brother and her affairs with married men.

As it turned out, there was a lot I learned from the shelves of the Catholic library. My mother had better things to do than pin book pages. Margo put her faith in the good judgement of the acquisition librarians. I was free to roam.

In the winter of eighth grade I stumbled upon sex. I was nestled in one of Margo's armchairs, reading from a coming of age novel, when the main character let a much older man take her clothes off and touch her 'down there'. Uh-oh. And with Margo banging dinner pots ten feet from me. I raced through the next pages and stuck the book in my schoolbag to re-read it later.

When Margo asked me about the book, I lied.

"It's boring, you wouldn't like it."

"The back-cover sounded good."

"It's not your kind of story."

It was the first time I remembered lying to her.

The order of the belt

Over the span of forty-some odd years, Margo's thin belt took a long slow drift upward from waist, to lower-rib cage to stomach to just an inch below the breasts where it finally came to anchor.

There is no telling what the belt was supposed to hold. Margo's polyester dresses were sober of pleats and flounces. The belt was no match for any kind of serious flesh. Whatever needed to be held was more ephemeral than cloth or belly fat, more slippery also. It had to be watched and polished with habit and discipline.

The belt was part of a uniform that also included flat laced-up shoes, thick brown hoses held by a garter and mysterious knit undergraments that were put out to dry in the privacy of the cellar where they could be shielded from the curiosity of neighbors and little children (me included).

As a piece of outerwear, the belt held a special place as the finishing touch to Margo's outfits: the cherry on top, the accessory that declared her fit to be seen in company, acceptable to the world. Beltless, she was either an household item wandering about the house in her nightshirt, or an uneasy vacationer in one piece black swimsuit, dipping a timid toe in seawater. Either way, she was uncomfortable, anxious to get into her real clothes, tighten herself back into place.

But not too tight. Whenever a belt would threating the delicate balance between comfort and propriety, Margo would sit at the dining room table to restore order in the world. She would punch a new belt hole with her scissor tips, round the hole with a fork tooth and work the buckle through the hole to smooth the edges as best she could. It took several weeks for the new hole to fit. She never seemed to mind.

She was patient. She preferred order and the safety of the loop around her body.

The kitchen clock

There were thousands of objects in Margo's house, each containing its own story and sometimes the story of something else attached to it. For a while I knew every broom, pail, crucifix, cotton sheet, shelf, cushion, radio set, picture frame in that house. I knew where some of the dishes came from, three generations back, and which button had been ripped from what shirt and which won at a card game. I could find the worn aluminum spoon whose missing particles had attached themselves to the roofs of our palate over time. I knew where to store the soup pot and where to find the extra stick of butter.

I knew I had paid 70 francs for the kicthecn clock I purchased for Margo's birthday (the equivalent of about $10.00, an enormous sum it seemed to me in 1974). The clock bore the picture of an older woman making dinner. Even though the woman didn't look like her (she never wore her hair in a bun), Margo knew that the clock meant I lover her more than anything in the world. It was still easy to love her that way at thirteen.

She hung the clock on the wall above the kitchen cabinet. I would face it whenever I sat at the dining room table. Margo would sit in that same spot in the afternoons, sipping coffee and knitting, so that the clock would be held in our mutual gaze.

The sugar bowl

I have been using Margo's sugar bowl to store my necklaces. She would be appalled. For Margo, objects had precise functions that could not be changed.

She kept the sugar bowl in the cupboard above the stove, took it out for breakfast, lunch and afternoon coffee.

The afternoon coffee was for visitors: her sister, Gilberte every other Monday, and her sister-in-law, Jeanette, every other Tuesday. They would sit at the dining room table to sew or knit and share the family gossips. Margo would make coffee with milk and put out a dish of cookies on the table. She would pour two small glasses of liquor - cognac, grand-marnier, whatever was available - and they would sip the liquor and drink coffee for a few hours.

I would watch my grandmother's legs from my spot under the dining room table where she would send me to play. The table was like a small play house. I could set my red plastic tea set on the floor and play with my dolls there as long as I was careful not to step on toes.

At the appointed time, Margo would call me from under the table.
- "Do you want a 'canard'?" she'd ask.

She would dunk a sugar cube in her glass of liquor.
- "Eat it fast!"

The sugar felt warmer than usual. The liquor stung my throat. It wasn't the 'canard' I liked as much as the sight of the liquor rising in the sugar. How could liquid go up like that? If I held the sugar cube too long, it could crumble in the glass and Margo would get upset.

- "Look what you did," she'd say. "Now I have to drink it all."

And she would make a face at so much sugar in her mouth.

Margo's idea of getting ready was to wash her face with plain soap and water, comb her hair and brush her teeth. End of story.

"It's o.k. to be poor, but you can't be filthy," she'd explain.

She was proud of the fact that she'd purchased a tooth brush with her first wages at the age of twelve. "People didn't brush their teeth back then," she'd say. "You should have seen how they looked, with their teeth all green and black like that." The toothbrush served her well: she had perfect teeth well into her eighties.

She didn't wear make-up. Her jewelry was pragmatic: a wedding ring to announce her status, a watch to read the time, and a medal of Christ to keep in God's good graces. She'd wear the brooches she'd receive for Christmas or Mother's day. It was her duty to wear whatever was gifted but it would have never occurred to ask for it. The closest she came to acquiring jewelry was when she puchased a small silver medal of Mary from the Mt Des Cats monastery (she gave me the medal).

She wore flat shoes with shoelaces and owned one purse that she took out of the closet on Sundays. She rotated through four or five polyester dresses and a handful of blouses, and never worried about her weight. She cooked with butter, drank wine and ate the leftovers before finishing a meal. Witht the years and an expanding waistline, the thin belt she wore over her dress took on more of a symbolic than a practical role. Eventually, the belt came to rest a couple of inches below her breasts. It stayed there to the end.

Prepared

She wore a cardigan year round. The worst would have been to die of "un chaud et un froid" (a spell of "hot and cold").

She worried about drafty places and sudden changes in the weather. She needn't have worried; Dunkirk is windy and rainy nine months out of the year.

Every three or four years, she'd knit herself a new hat and gloves and perhaps a cardigan.

She wore a man's scarf over her raincoat, a plastic protector over her hat and zippered boots that hugged her calves. She fastened steel clamps to the sole of her shoes during ice storms, never forgot her handkerchief and her house key.

Her key ring held a miniature replica of a rubber boot, an old gift from a shoe salesman. She kept her coinpurse in her coat pocket where no thief would reach. There never was a thief to be found on the "rue de la Republique" (Republic Street). Still, she was prepared.