Fenway Park: So good (So good!)

                   I

The Game and the Backdrop

Late October brings one thousand remembrances that creep in through the tasks. It is a time of analytical repose juxtaposed by all the hurry of putting gardens and fields to sleep, of sealing drafts and catching mice, of collecting sawing chopping splitting and stacking. There are apples to bring in, sauces to simmer, cookbooks to pour over in hopes of finding one more reason to keep the oven going.  Coats to be dug out. Mittens slated for darning and knitting needles and patterns fetched from hiding and put to work.

Autumn’s combinations of sitting and sprinting and, you know, this thing called the World Series, have sent my mind a-wandering to Fenway Park.

Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Oh, Fenway. Storied pleasure ground of fathers and sons, fanatics and franks, curses and delight, you are the unofficial last gem in our city’s emerald necklace. Green and lit, mown and chalked, you are our beloved theater, the treasure chest of tricks, our Neil Diamond music box.

Gloria Therese

My grandmother, in handsewn jumpsuit, and her son–my father–circa 1960.

 

It is the heart of October and I have been away for too long. September was ushered in with wedding plans and clothes and fittings and the endless mysteries of mineral makeup. I never thought I’d be so primped and prodded and spruced but then I never thought I’d be asked to be a bridesmaid in the Catholic-Goan union of two dear friends. It was delightful. I also got fantastically sick a few times, and then I learned of the death of my grandmother, Gloria Therese Hauf.

I’ve seen a lot of things in the last many weeks, bits of wildernesses and brightness, the first hushed wearinesses of autumn and now the crisp cold mornings of it, the undressing trees beside the golden garbed. But they all pale in comparison to the remembrances and great love that I hold for this woman whom I was blessed to have for twenty-nine years of life, who graced this world for 87.

I was going to just write about her for a while, but I’m not ready for sentences yet, only snapshots: her backyard raspberries crowning my fingers, baking cookies in the late morning, listening to the bread machine beat the stuff of ascension into flour. I remember her aprons, her hands driving clothespins. The shade cast by the cherry tree, her poppies beside the backdoor. Picnics. The strength of her arms around me. The stitches of all the clothes she sewed and knit to cover me.

My grandmother was and is and always will be one of the greatest blessings bestowed upon my life.

Thanks for waiting until now and for waiting a little while more, too, while I get the blog back up and running in the coming days. For now I don’t know how to end an entry of someone so utmost, so endless, so distant; so I’ll do it with a portrait.