Tall Corn
My mother’s parents, the ones my brother and I refer to as Grama and Grampa, lived on Sycamore Street in Sycamore, Illinois when we were young. We drove out there through the northern Illinois countryside to see them frequently. My mother was close to her parents, and she was their only child. We were always ready for a trip to Sycamore, even if, on the way back, my mother would often gently — and kind of alarmingly — slap her own face to stay awake behind the wheel.
Grama’s house was great. She was a mostly self-taught cook and baker who worked from the old family recipes passed down from mother to daughter. She always had freshly-made chocolate chip cookies for us, and maybe a walk to the local grocery store later. Her attic was stuffed with memories and she encouraged us to carefully explore all we wanted.
Grama and Grampa loved the outdoors. On their numerous camping adventures they did a lot of rock hounding. The treasures they brought back interested us for hours; not only the tales they told about how the rocks were acquired, but just the rocks themselves told their own tales.
Grama was the librarian at the Sycamore Public Library, and it was here that we formed our ideas about the ideal place to store books. It was a Carnegie library, small but grand in its way, with a dome and tall windows, dark, deliciously creaky floors, and rows and rows of book shelves. I remember the best nook for reading was up a short flight of steps to the round room formed by the dome, with windows on 3/4 of the perimeter. When books were deemed too beat up to lend out, they would do light repairs and then put them in a pile for the employees to take home. We got a lot of books that way and I treasure most the ones with the “Sycamore Public Library” stamp on several of their pages.
Every summer, we could count on at least one drive out to Sycamore every two weeks or oftener, right up into my own son’s early life. As the summer came to its glorious, golden end, we became aware that in the fall Grama and Grampa would soon pack up and drive south to winter in Texas. Then it became our job to drive to their house every so often, as the snows permitted, to check up on things and make sure all was safe and the water still turned off. It was weird to walk through those rooms like little spooks, knowing our grandparents were a thousand miles away. It was weird without their sounds and smells, without their smiles to warm the place.
It is about that time of year, when the days were just beginning to let off the heat a little bit, when the summer began to fade, as summers will do. It was the time when we spent a little extra time talking with our grandparents, going for walks with them, running up and down the aisles in the old library before it opened, just to hear that creaking of the maple floors stained dark from generations of “the public”, as Grama would call them, lying on the living room floor soaking up the sun streaming in the window.
And Grampa would say to our mother, “Bet? Be careful of the tall corn. Remember, you can’t see around it this time of year on those country roads.” It was his way of saying how much he loved us all, and it was all the evidence we would ever get. It was enough.
I hear the late summer cicadas out there now, and feel the sun warming my feet. I see the blue sky smiling at me as if I had not a worry in the world, and I long for those days again, when I could hear my grampa’s step ring on the concrete porch steps, hear my grama’s chortle in the kitchen, hear my mother switch to the gentle Georgia accent like she always did when she was with them. These are sweet, cherished memories and I hope I never forget.
