Next Politics and Kool-Aid
By Jessica D'Ambrosio
My grandmother once lived
in a big, old house. Just around the corner
from the little store and
down the hill from our favorite exploring place.
Grammy used to call us home for lunch and we'd all sit
down, in front of the news to eat our soup and crackers
and sip red Kool-Aid through a crazy straw.
We had no idea what Ronald Reagan's political agenda was,
and we didn't really want to know why Gorbachev was relative to our lives.
We were too busy with the Muppets and the tree fort in the back yard
to care.
We would walk down the street without a worry in the world,
because we didn't know any better.
The neighborhood was safe and sound and we never locked the front door... Why would
anyone want to do bad things to us?
One summer, we bought sidewalk chalk. Not the skinny stuff like teachers use;
we got big, fat, colored chalk.
And we drew an entire town in the middle of the street. Hardly anyone
ever drove down Chestnut Street, so we always owned the road.
I got a radio-controlled race car for Christmas. We put at least
a thousand miles on that poor old car that summer. The perfect size for our chalk town.
One year we tried to open a lemonade stand. One major dilemma stood in our way;
Grammy had no lemondae. We figured Orange-Ade would do.
Our only customers that summer were Mom, Grammy and the mailman.
We made about $2.00 that summer. Not too bad.
I remember when the house across the street burned down.
Where are those people going to live now, Mom?
They are probably living with family somewhere. All summer, I wondered where those
people went. I felt bad and said they could live with us. I didn't know them, but I wanted to be nice.
When they tore the house down, it smelled bad. Like too many matches all at once.
They built a new house there.
It was nicer than the other one. Did those people come back to live there,
or was it just too hard?
Mom worked about 3 miles from Grammy and
sometimes we would walk to her office and Surprise! She always had candy for us and
brought us downstairs for pizza. It always tasted better after we walked to her office...
regular take-out just wasn't good enough.
One year, Grammy had a stroke. She was different and we didn't know why.
She had to go to therapy... She was still our Grammy.
She had another stroke and was put in the hospital.
She couldn't talk anymore and she seemed sad.
Mom and my uncles had to put Grammy in a nursing home.
Why couldn't she just live with us? I want Grammy to live with us.
She needs special care. We can visit her.
Grammy died.
She used to live in that big, old house.
Just her. It was all she needed.
It was all she wanted.
And we used to visit her at that house.
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