For a few years now I’ve been taking staycations in October. I’ve been at my job long enough to have a healthy accrual rate for time off, so blessedly, not every day off has to be for an Occasion. I now take time during my favorite season just to do things I want to do: reading in hammocks, visiting friends’ new babies. Day trips.
This past October I felt a little guilty about taking the full week1 because I’d also just been to France and I was about to embark on a week off for Mexico City. So I shortened my request to three days and was decidedly less ambitious about what I would do.
I still did plenty—tried a new yoga studio, treated myself to a breakfast sandwich, met up with friends for a full-moon ritual, and picked a staggering 17 pounds of apples, which I gave myself blisters pressing through a food mill to make into my annual batch of apple butter.
But the thing I did that is most memorable to me, most tangible, had to do with a different kind of apple picking.
On the final day of this year’s staycation, I lingered at a coffee shop for long enough that I decided to bail on my plans to leave the city in the afternoon, opting instead to stay local and wander through shops downtown. I browsed the record store, a couple of cute boutiques, and then stopped into Raxx Vintage to look at their housewares. I had literally no agenda for the day and was just killing time, so I did an extremely lazy, slow lap. And then for no reason but an itch in my brain, I decided to do the lap again, because: what if I’d missed something? Never mind that it didn’t matter if I’d missed something because I wasn’t looking for anything in the first place—still, some part of me was saying: look again.
On the corner of the same table I’d just picked over was a solid brass apple, 21 ounces of weight and whimsy. I think I would have delighted in it even if I hadn’t had a pre-existing tie to this particular objet d’art, but it was the exact same brass apple that my Mamie had kept in her apartment for 30+ years, neatly displayed on a doily—an anchor object that tied me to my now-lost grandmother. I had just returned from a trip to France, our first as a family in seven years, since the last one we took to attend Mamie’s meticulously planned funeral. Finding this particular thing—especially since some quiet voice had urged me to look a little closer—felt like kismet.
I walked out $20 poorer and a brass apple richer, keeping it carefully away from the vinyl records it could easily have battered out of shape, pleased with the weight it bore on my shoulder.
At home I kept looking at it on my curio shelf like some fae trap, like there was something magic and therefore potentially dangerous in my having found it. I even started to doubt that it was the same one: was I hallucinating its familiarity, altering my memory to give it significance? So the next time my father came to visit, without mentioning anything about its provenance I picked the apple up and asked him, “Do you recognize this?” and without a second thought he said, “Yeah, it was my mom’s.” It wasn’t, of course, exactly that one, but it might as well have been.
I am, as Heidi Julavits writes in The Folded Clock, an object person. I defy death (or, in my case, I make peace with it? I bring myself out from under it and draw myself up beside it?) by clinging to physical objects left behind by people who have been lost. These become evidence that those people, though no longer here, were; in my collection, I disallow death from completing its erasure. So much of my relationship with my French grandmother felt intangible. Whenever I was with her, I gravitated toward the thing about her life that seemed to have the most weight. And these many years later, without her, I seemed to gravitate toward it still.
The first iteration of this newsletter was on TinyLetter, a MailChimp product that has since been sunsetted, and so I can’t link to most of my past issues.2 But this time of year six years ago, without the benefit of having the object within my grasp, I named an essay about my Mamie after this very thing. That’s how important it had been to me.
Today, with the brass apple in reach, the oils of my living fingerprints on its polished surface, I’m resharing that essay. I’ll never again feel the pressure of my grandmother’s hands on my shoulders, but I can choose to feel this, and remember her.
Yours in survival,
Arielle
Grief Beach #61: Brass Apples
(originally shared January 25, 2019)
There are the parts you remember, and the parts you forget; there are the parts that slip your mind and the parts you consciously choose to put out of it. There are the parts that usually soften like watercolors in the memory, but restore themselves into crisp, accusive detail the moment you realize it's too late to do anything to change them.
If I were better at drawing I could recreate the walk up to Mamie's apartment on rue de la Paix, a street nearly 4,000 miles from my own. I can tell you that the button to her floor in the apartment building's ancient elevator was the only one on the panel that was yellowed, so that even as a child I could always remember how to get to her.
I can feel the heft of the decorative brass apples she kept on the hutch in the dining room, the ones I'd gravitate toward as soon as we entered her apartment, as she approached us for la bise and I—self-conscious of our language barrier—sought something more familiar even than her expectant face, something solid and knowable.
I remember these visits—the smells and the narrow hallways and the predictable early-evening apéritifs—but I also remember the ends of them.
We visited Annecy every two years growing up, usually only 10-14 days at a time; not enough, really, to forge a strong bond with grandparents I could barely otherwise talk to. What's more, these visits were some of our only family vacations. I was more interested in slurping down vacherin and taking trips on the pédalos than I was in politely recounting how I was doing in school. As a child, I resented the fact that other kids got to know their grandparents and then went on fun summer trips; the fact that my summer vacations involved fulfilling so many family obligations in a row made them feel like homework, like hygiene.
More than once I angled to save the final nights of these trips to ourselves: no extended family, just us. Let's have fun, I whined. So we say goodbye a little early. What's the big deal? I wish I could say that this was just a pressure I applied when I was a child, but that would be a lie; I did this well into my 20s. I did this until the end.
What I remember about the ends of these visits is the ominously dark hallway between Mamie's draped apartment door and the elevator. How she would tell us she loved us as my mother embraced her warmly; how I would say something affectionate in faltering French and how Isabelle, a head taller but still trying to hide behind me, would repeat it over my shoulder. How we'd conduct this closing ceremony with only the scant light that came from her apartment, and then the dim fluorescents when the elevator door opened; how we'd step into it as she stood at her door, still volleying au revoir, au revoir. And how things would seem even darker and more distant suddenly when Mamie, standing six feet away and watching the elevator doors slide shut, without fail, started to cry, her hand pressed to her mouth.
What I remember about the ends of these visits is that I always wanted them over with.
What I remember about the ends of these visits, now, is that she was always hoping to put them off.
I avoided her tears for decades because there was nothing to be done. Because they appeared so predictably they felt like part of the ritual rather than an expression of genuine need. Or because I couldn't talk to her, or more likely, because I didn't try.
At her funeral, late in the hardest year of my life, I was the one crying. Through the eulogies, through the interment and the drive home from the cemetery. In the bathroom at the family dinner that night, between courses. My family acknowledged it tacitly, but didn't fuss too much. They let me roll with it. Part of the ritual.
In the worst of my grief I was fearful of how callous I was becoming, but there was another, larger dread: the realization of the meanness that had always been a part of me.
I had to confront that there were facets of my relationships I would never be able to soften, because they were gone. Those I'd hurt, now insensate to any gesture I could make.
Three Things Bringing Me Joy
Unstructured hangs.
There was a Self article bouncing around recently about how Doing Nothing With Your Favorite People Is Really, Really Good for You, and I felt smug as shit because it came out after Katie and I had done exactly this. I had posted an Instagram story with a picture of my living room and she had DMed me asking “can I come be cozy in your house?” The next time she came over, yes we talked for a bit, yes we chatted about politics and our love lives—but then we threw on a fireplace YouTube video, each burrowed under a throw blanket, and had respective reading time on opposite ends of the couch. The innovation!! You can be friends by just BEING FRIENDS.Gag gifts (sorry).
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR NOSFERATU: In Nosferatu, a movie about sexual appetite and control as embodied by the vampire Nosferatu, in which Nosferatu menaces and manipulates his way into the minds and souls and bodies of his victims, you also happen see Nosferatu’s dong. It’s ghostly white, it’s creepy, it—fails to flop in the way a real hog does? Which is because it’s a prosthetic worn by the movie’s star, Bill Skarsgård (undoubtedly the most goblinesque of the Skarsgård clan). Nicholas Hoult, who plays Hutter, complained about feeling the silicone schlong on his leg during bloodsucking scenes. So as a wrap gift for Hoult, Skarsgård had it mounted like a trophy. Just a bloodless, inert baloney pony. What joy.
Movie Club.
I recently joined a movie club where we share a Discord server to discuss our film opinions, but here’s the thing: they take it seriously? Honestly, it’s kind of joyous to be in a group where I’m one of the most thoughtless people. All my Letterboxd reviews are shitposts and all my friends are brilliant.
What I’m Reading
She tells me she draws and paints and stitches. She tells me that drawing and painting and stitching are just doing, that what makes something art is the intention behind it. If the intention is to communicate some intangible feeling or slippery truth that resists capture by words, then it is art.
—Where I End by Sophie White
(thanks, capitalism!)
But I have the content and would like to put the essays on a personal website somewhere, if anyone would ever like to help me play around with Wordpress platforms!