When we were growing up. we'd often take part of our summer vacation to to visit grandma. Grandma lived alone on the old family farm. Grandpa had died of a heart attack when I was very young. My siblings and I liked to run around the fields, explore the old hay barn, and help grandma pick peas and pull carrots from her garden. When you're a kid, it seems that the young have always been young, the old always old. I did not have the life experience or the imagination to look at grandma and rewind time. She talked of grandpa, and how they were married after the Korean War. She talked about life on the farm, out in all the rolling hills of the Mid-West. There was an old Pace Arrow travel trailer parked beside the small farm house. It looked like it'd been parked for decades.
Although the aluminum exterior was coated in decades of dust, and faded by the sun, the interior was perfectly preserved. Inside was small as the cabin of a sailing boat, with compact shelves, a small gas stove, an old metal fridge, and plaid cushions. The walls were plywood. It smelled of dust, and dead flies. But I loved it. When we'd stay over, I'd always ask to take a sleeping bag out to the trailer rather than sleep on the couch.
I knew grandpa and grandma had gotten the trailer after the Korean War and would take annual roadtrips--some out to California to visit a great-aunt I'd never met. Some to Oregon, where we also have family. To me, the travel trailer was more a museum than anything. I couldn't imagine grandma as a young married woman in her 20s and 30s. I never really knew grandpa. From old Army pictures, I knew he was slender, but strong. He often wore aviator-style sunglasses. The closest thing I could picture was one of the guys in the TV show MASH. I imagined her was a fun guy, someone who liked cocktails and to have fun with his pals. He liked pretty girls, because I found an old calendar from 1953, with images of pin-up girls. That was my first discovery in the trailer.
As I mentioned, the inside of the trailer was like a sailing ship. All the cabinets were small, and some had shelves inside, and drawers or shelves inside shelves. Partly, it's to save space, and partly to keep the contents of the trailer packed as tightly as possible during motion. Regardless, it didn't seem as if anyone had actually ever cleaned out the trailer. There was no food, inside, of course--the fridge and food cabinets had been cleared long ago to avoid mice. However, all the tiny camping cook pots were still stacked neatly in the cabinet by the stove. There were forks and spoons in a drawer, and miscellaneous utensils in another, an old can opener, cork screw, and spatula. It was as if the trailer was on standby, as if grandpa could pump up the tires and fill the propane tank, and grandma could wipe down the countertops and stock new food and they'd be off on another adventure. I guess that's what happened, when grandpa had a heart-attack. You never leave things totally unpacked and put away. Everything is half packed.
As a kid, you don't always understand the exact past of a place, its specific memory, or why it feels so alive, but it's an intuitive sensation. I found old TIME magazines from the 50s, and a in one drawer dozens of recipes clipped out from magazines. I was starting to feel what it might have been like to take a trailer from the Great Plains, across the Rockies to the Pacific. What an adventure it must have been. The highway system being built, and gas cheap and all the cars with big V8 engines that could haul a small Pace Arrow to new places.
The older I got, the more I explored the trailer. I was probably 12 or 13 when I found the first nude. It was a small black and white glossy image with ruffled edges. The kind a Brownie camera would take. Very similar to the ones of grandpa's Korean War scrapbook. The image showed a pin-up girl. As I looked closer, though, I realized the pin-up was inside a trailer. Then, I recognized the style of plywood cabinets and glancing from the image to the bed of the trailer, I realized the snapshot had been made right where I was standing. It was an eerie sensation, as it suddenly looking in on someone's private experience.
The model had a lovely body, which I appreciated as a 13 year old boy. It took me a while, but I realized the woman was not a professional pin-up, but actually Grandma. I couldn't believe my eyes. There she was,in her early 20s in the 1950s. She was a knock out.
I found another image, this one clearly had my grandpa in it, sitting on the door steps of the trailer, reading a map. A woman stands inside, holding a cup of coffee. She's walked over to the door to talk to him. He looks up. Her hair is darker, and bouffant, like in the style of the early '60s. Grandpa might have been about 30. Grandma still in her 20s.
My understanding and appreciation of my grandparents grew with that discovery. I saw them not just as old people on a farm, but once young and active and very attractive.
That was then. Years later, when I was in college and Grandma was sick, I returned to the farm with my family. We all knew Grandma was dying of lung cancer. Her entire generation chain smoked from the 40s up until my childhood in the 80s. By then it was too late. So, that last trip to the farm, we each took what we wanted to remember Grandma. I wish I could have taken the entire travel trailer. Instead, secretly, I took the handful of glossy black and white snapshots I'd uncovered as a teen.
Years later, after Grandma passed away, and the farm was sold, I puzzled over the images. In the first one, Grandma looks like such an innocent country girl. You can see her naturally sandy-blonde hair pulled up. Her freckled nose. In the second one, she looks older and more glamourous. She's plucked her eyebrows and put on make-up. She's died her hair brunette or dark red. Perhaps my grandpa set the camera on its tripod and set the self-timer. The image looks candid, but also a bit posed, as if they knew the door would be a nice frame for the composition. If Grandma has really just woken up with her morning coffee, would she have perfect makeup? The element of pose makes it even stronger. Just before the camera clicked, she shifted her leg, reached down and touched Grandpa on the shoulder. She was giving him a perfect sight, then, and always.
I don't know about Heaven. Or an afterlife. I'd like to think, though, that if it is true, and if we do go to Heaven, it's a returning point to our favorite memories. I'd like to think that there's a campground beside a lake in California, with a travel trailer parked at the shore, and Grandma and Grandpa are young again and beautiful. And naked.
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