The day before we left, I had pulled my back out. Mom insisted that I take one of Dad’s muscle relaxers. The car trip to my Nana’s is 3 hours; I thought it was normal to drive this long to see your grandparents when I was little. I fell asleep only 45 minutes into the trip. My body felt loose and numb all over from the medicine. I wondered how it was legal to be high like this.
Nana’s house was a magical far away land, like Narnia or Oz. She lives in a ranch style home on an expansive cattle farm. The barn was always full of a new variety of cats and sometimes we would swim in the nearby creek and catch crawfish or have a bonfire up by the lake. Once we started to get older, the farm slowly transformed into real life. We realized that the cats were different every time because they would die often, the creek was contaminated by cow manure and my grandparents were too old to drag logs and sticks up for the bonfire.
I woke up on the long driveway; they had had it filled up with a fresh stock of gravel, and the tires crunched and shook the car back and forth. I glanced out the window in a tired stupor to see a baby cow bucking and chasing after us through the muddy field. The grass was bright with spring despite the sudden cold that had descended onto Kentucky the day before; it had even snowed in Cincinnati.
Last year was tough. We had only seen Nana and Papa Jack three or four times, and when we did come down, we had to sit in the yard in lawn chairs under the relentless summer sun while they sat in the shade of the porch more than 12 feet away. The warm, hard squeezes and cheek kisses were just memories driven away by the fear of a premature death. But today was different; It was Easter and most of us were fully vaccinated.
All of us were full of an unprecedented joy for each other. We were quickly pushed into the sweet cinnamon smelling house with immaculately clean surfaces and eclectic collections of coffee cups and barbie dolls. My body was floating, and we were having Pizza hut for dinner; tomorrow would be the big Easter Lunch.
Nana’s yard was huge to us; It had enough space for a front porch, a back porch, a play set, a garden and a full-sized pool (not to mention two sheds and a full-sized parking lot.) It was perfect for hiding brightly colored eggs. The five of us, my cousins and two siblings, would excitedly wait on the porch, clutching our wicker baskets, waiting for the announcement of, ‘GO!’. Then we would fly out, forgotten sandals flinging off of our feet behind us. The grand prize was a ten-dollar bill stuffed into one of the eggs, but we wouldn’t mind a five, a one, or a piece of candy, if we got it.
It was tradition to play cards after dinner. We all loved to play games, and I especially had a competitive streak. Winning games was expected of me, and I silently reveled in my victories, projecting an unconcerned benevolence. That night I was so tired. I had fallen asleep again on the loveseat, but I was roused by the exhilarated musings of my 16-year-old brother. We played spades in partners and the two of us were victorious by 9 ‘o clock.
Five years ago, I would’ve been pessimistic about the bunny littered house and the decorative lights shaped like eggs. Now, 20 years old, I possessed a love for these things that I could hardly contain. I was fascinated and enamored; not with the consumerism of it, but with the charm of a grandparent’s compulsive decorating and the way little things like it create a fuzzy atmosphere.
Lunch was made up of numerous dishes, enough to 10 people. There were crockpots lined up on the countertop and the stove was crowded with porcelain baking dishes. We greedily loaded our plates, the edges of each dish mixing into horrible concoctions and stuffed our mouths like chipmunks. Afterwards we draped out sluggish bodies over the couches in the living room, lost in edible dreams. A reminder of the pie in the oven was like a punch to the gut and we urged our digestive tracks to hurry.
Sunday morning, we packed the car full of our overnight bags; mom’s minivan had plenty of room to accommodate for the four of us. In three hours, we’d be home again, away from the field covered hills and abundant cow smells. As we waved goodbye to our grandparents behind the screen-door I wondered what it would be like if we were closer together. Would it have ruined the magic of it? Would more frequent visits taint that importance of the memories we had of them? I couldn’t imagine them living in Northern Kentucky, nor us living in Central Kentucky. We were part of those worlds; it would be wrong to remove either of us. I smiled out the window, excited to see them again in a couple of months, and let my eyes droop down, the car lulling me back to sleep.