Rachel Loring

My grandmother, my Yaya, died last Tuesday. This Thursday, I’ll board a plane and go, for perhaps the last time ever, to my Yaya’s house. Growing up, visiting Yaya in Virginia was my favorite thing in the whole world. We’d drive ten hours until we reached Norfolk, a name I loved because if you said it right, it sounded like a curse word and you felt like you were getting away with something. We’d pull up to the corner of Montague and Pythian and I’d think about how great the word Pythian was. I thought when I wrote a novel one day, I’d call it that, Crossing Pythian, and it would be about cousins who end up being assholes and uncles who call your mom a bitch and never apologize. And then I would think that it didn’t sound like a story I would enjoy very much. But it stuck in my head, crossing Pythian and whatever it meant. We weren’t allowed on Pythian Street when we were little. It was heavy with traffic and the neighbors across it had a suspicious trailer in their backyard that made a lot of metallic, staccato noise at night. One time, the same summer my grandad died, I got in trouble for sprinting across it on a dare. Things were different maybe because I crossed the street, but probably because my grandad was dead, and he wasn’t supposed to be yet. And things changed, but we still had Yaya and so all my precious childhood memories of my second home, of my Yaya’s house, were still warm and grainy like a film reel. And now, she’s gone, and I can cross Pythian whenever I want. And now, it’s irreconcilably different because when I leave her big white house on Montague Street, I don’t know what will stay with me and what will stick her to wooden paneled walls and get left behind. And now, everything that happened and was going to happen at that home has. I want to believe that even though you cross Pythian and even though your Yaya is dead, it’s all still there, home. But I think of all the memories I have stored in the corners of her kitchen cabinets and under her carpeted staircase and in the drawers of my mom’s old vanity and I wonder where I’ll rehome them. I wonder if maybe home is inherently tied to a place, and when you lose that place the tie is severed. I think about shaggy green carpets and wonder if I’ll remember them different if I can never smell them again. If I’ll remember the grout lines in the upstairs shower. I think about the hedge that doesn’t grow quite right because my brother and cousins and I would see who could jump over it and end up just landing on top of it. I wonder if it’ll ever grow back. And what will happen to me that day it does. When we used to go to Virginia, I would spend the last night before we went back home lying awake in my mom’s old twin bed and wishing that it would be night forever. I thought that if I willed it enough, time would freeze and I could forever be at Yaya’s house, where I could sleep in late and go treasure hunting in the attic and drink coffee with my aunts even though I was too young. And I’d wish that I could remember every grain of dust on the doorframes and the unique click each light switch made, but I knew that eventually I’d forget and just remember the bigger things. I’d remember the way my aunt’s laugh sounded when we played card games. I’d remember the way my grandma’s hands looked as she altered my dresses for me. I’d remember the time I fell down the stairs and my brother almost had a heart attack because he thought I was dead. And I’d remember what It looked like when we drove away, and my grandma would watch from the front porch and cry. And I remember how it felt, to be loved that way. And I think that’s what home feels like. And I hope it stays that way the last time I cross Pythian to go back home.