In Company with the Little Lady (Personal Essay No. 1 Revision No. 2)

 This essay is still in progress and I am still seeking feedback and criticism!
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 In case you have not yet experienced the joy of summertime in Bend, I need you to know that it is lovely. The light is all roses and gold and the air is both crisp and soft. I do not have words tender enough to describe all the green things growing out of the ground, or the way people’s eyes light up when they see them in the park. The people of Bend, natives and visitors alike, love summer. It can be seen on their faces by the way their smiles change from looking dutiful and required, like taxes, to organically manifesting between sunburned, freckled cheeks. It is as if the smile cannot help but appear there. Summertime; sometimes when I am sitting near a window and sunlight warms my face I imagine that I am there, in summer. There are so many things to keep one company in summer, it is nearly impossible to be lonely with all the new grass growing under one’s feet.
    This story is not really about summer in Bend, but it creates a lovely scene, does it not? It is hard to describe something so beautiful without using beautiful words, making the description sound like it belongs in some well-written book. Maybe that’s why my grammie loved summertime in Bend; because it reminded her of a passage out of a book. I do not know if that is true, but it makes me smile.
    I remember an afternoon in the summer, which I have established as being wonderful, when grammie and grandpa were visiting. Grammie and I were in the music room at my parents’ house. There was a big bay window opening up into the summer light before us, baby grand piano on the right. She was sitting on that rocking recliner she and grandpa had reupholstered for my dad years earlier. I always felt a kinship with the fishermen on the fabric, endlessly casting their lines into a pond made of thread, surrounded by grass composed of the same. Grammie was likely wearing some handmade purple floral polyester ensemble like she usually did. She often made her own clothes, because she preferred to be comfortable and she preferred her clothes to be purple. It was, after all, her favorite color. I still think of her when I see it. Her feet were probably tucked into work Birkenstocks.
    I do not remember what my eight-year-old self was doing before she called me over, or what I was wearing. I do know that it was just the two of us in the room, it was afternoon, and it was summer.
    She held the book near her chest, her heart, as she explained its significance to me. “I’ve had this book for a long time,” she said, her age-spotted hands tenderly holding the aged yellow pages. Grammie looked at the book the way other people look at photographs of their favorite childhood friend; knowingly, fondly, with a soft sigh of remembrance. The worn pages of the book were bound together between a threadbare cover, so the word “bound” is used very loosely.  I recognized it as she held it, I think, like it was a book she had read to me before. Maybe she hadn’t. But I remember looking at it, seriously, as if it was a book I already knew well. She warned me to not let it fall open as she passed it to me, and I felt its weight in my hands. I can no longer recall whether she or my dad used packing tape to reinforce the binding of the book, an ungraceful attempt at slowing the deterioration that had already begun. Pages, pictures, and stories gone missing, numbered sheets out of their intended sequence. Deterioration and aging happens quietly without begging our permission or pardon. We all make ungraceful attempts to slow it. Sometimes I ponder how afraid we are of something falling into pieces and returning to the dust. Does that slow and quiet death remind us of ourselves? Or, are we simply determined to maintain our lives and objects in a state of beauty, not because of fear, but because we really believe they should be beautiful, as if it is a birthright? Is it a fear of detached covers and lost pages that cause us to tape up the bindings of books, or is it a desire to make sure we can read the story again? Do we mourn death or celebrate lives at funerals?
    The summer light coming through the window must have been beautiful when I held the book close to my own chest, my own heart. Grammie then said that we should write my name in the cover of the book. I opened the cover carefully and saw her name there; Lois Burnett, and next to it the name of her sister who died while she was still small; Gladys Burnett. The date noted next to their names was 1939. I knew then that it was not a mere book that I was holding in my hands. It was part of her memories, of her sister, moving throughout Oregon, settling in her own home in Lebanon, and raising her three children. She carried that book with her for over 60 years before handing it to me. I am sure that there were many times, many difficult moves or rough years when it would have been easy to lose such an item.
    I watched her with a young amazement as she wrote on the inside cover with that elegant, graceful script I have always admired;
“To Jazmin Julene Miller
This was a special
book to me, and I
hope you will feel
it is special too.”
    I read the book several times after that, with her and by myself. The title was (and still is) The Little Lady: Her Book, and was published in 1901. Just as the title suggests the stories it contains are about a little girl. She and her parents reside in in the House of Many Windows, which is what she calls the apartment building she lives in, though she knows “it is really a great castle, with dungeons beneath and battlements at the top...” (p. 11). She takes outings in town with her father, Big Man, and goes to the sea, and has puppies, and eats sweets, sometimes before dinner.
    The Little Lady and I were reunited last year when I read the book again. I cried. The book was as sweet as I remembered, but I couldn’t tell grammie how much I still loved it because she had already passed away. I realize that she likely had no doubt that I would always love the book, but I still wish that I could tell her. I would tell her how much I love the graceful font of the title on the cover, the illustrations that were intended to be black and white but were colored in by some child less precocious than I. I still love the book, the words of the story, the words on the paper, the words in my hands. I am now far beyond the fear I felt when it was first handed to me, like I should encase it in glass and titanium, but I am thankful for the packing tape on the binding, because I plan on reading it to my children. Until then, it sits in a place of honor in company with other old and beautiful books that I have collected.
    Maybe I picked up those other old books because I wanted the Little Lady to never be lonely. I found them, brought them to my house, adopted them, and they all became a family. At least that’s what I would like to believe. I imagine that the Little Lady and Jo March and Tom Sawyer and talking horses from Narnia all sit down for tea together on a regular basis because they so conveniently abide on a shelf together.
    I have been many things, but lonely was never really one of them. I think this is due in large part to grammie. She introduced me to many friends that live within the covers of books. They helped keep me company even after she died, though they all had a sad look between their eyes because she would never be narrating them again.
    Family was always so important to her. That’s why she loved her children and her grandkids so well. She loved having us together at Thanksgiving and Christmas and whenever else we could make the trip over the mountains. She had this open-handed generosity that drew people to her. I never saw her waste anything or say ‘No’ when she had an opportunity to help. Now I have a whole pack of cousins that help honor her memory by modeling that way of living, and by keeping and reading her books. We have kept Brother and Sister Berenstain Bear and many others in the family. Maybe it’s because we all read the same books with her as kids, but I cannot look at my cousins without seeing little glimpses of grammie. But even without those glimpses and the reminders from book characters, however, I do not have to worry about losing her because I have her in writing.
    Well, I suppose it is not HER. How demeaning to suggest that a person, with all her complexity and warmth and practicality, could be written with pedestrian and base words on scratchy white paper. That implies that I know more of her than I do, and that what I don’t know (which is a great deal) is of no importance. So, while I do not have all of her in writing I have what I need. You see, she didn’t just write my name and her wish for me to enjoy the book in the cover that summer day. She also wrote that she loved me, in ink, and the Little Lady bears witness of that to this day.
    To believe that you are loved, not were loved, or could be loved, or even will be loved- it changes something in you. To believe that you are loved is to evict loneliness from your soul.
    The Little Lady and I were never lonely because we were always loved.