Oh to be here.
The Grenadines and a week to while away. Boxing Day come and gone and time to rest.
Upstairs and around. Funny. Not like a North American house, at least not like anything in Letchworth. A second floor but no hall or anything. Stairs in the corner and a balcony going all the way around inside the house, not outside like the beach house on the Louisiana coast that time on Christmas break with the girl down the hall at school.
The storms worse, though. Must be why. Stairs outside to likely to get ripped off when the winds picked up. Bad in Louisiana, but not as bad.
Noise from the children in the sitting room. Monopoly, but the English kind. Funny. So much of that played the American one they had at school looking odd. Pounds for dollars, the tokens the same but railway stations for railroads and all that. But always one that got all the hotels and won. That the same everywhere.
It all feeling like time going back and forth somehow. The same house and what looked like Grandmother’s shadow in the big bedroom. Gone thirty years but the floor the same red tile and half the rooms painted in that dark green she had picked out with the white trim. Funny. A memory that grew and grew. The stories nice to hear and the house grand.
The house something one would not have had otherwise. Father wanting a house down in the Keys but Grandmother winning out. A bigger house and concrete with red tile, not wood like the bungalows in Florida.
A third walk around and the room where the grownups had always sat to listen to the news on the BBC.
The same low bookcase underneath where the radio had sat with a few old books about to fall out at the end of the shelf. Everything put back upright and a whiff of the old book smell that smelled the same everyone. Old paper it must be with who knows what.
But a picture stuck in one for a bookmark. Grandmother at Strathmont Hall up in Maine, it must be. Setting out for one of those gymkhanas she had talked about. All those ribbons in the hope chest but nothing else.
Grandfather wanting to live in the city and no way to have a horse. But remembering forever. Three pairs of boots and a silver handled crop. Front row seats at the big horse show out in Dutchess County.
Memories . . . if only . . .up and down the beach a few times . . . .but the ribbons a dream to remember till the end of time . .
