Eleanor DelSignore (16)
Thread Wing
When I was very young, my grandmother used to tell me that life passes more quickly than I’d think. I would sit perched on her bed, fistfuls of quilt bunched up in my child-sized hands, watching her fold laundry or painstakingly paste stamps into her collection’s albums. When you get older, everything moves more quickly.
At the time, I did not believe her.
I grew up in Connecticut, my parents both ‘retired’ at 35 and 39, in a house my family renovated and would later sell. The yard stretched out to the fields and the woods, and it felt infinite as I sat on our new back patio, watching my father and uncle pat down the churned-up soil of the back gardens. The woods were endless; the swing set, once turquoise and now a rusted brownish-red, was a trip to another world every time I kicked my feet and swung higher, higher, higher. Sometimes I would let go as I reached the very peak of my arc, daring it to let me fall. (I never did; or maybe I did and I don’t remember it.)
My memories of that house are fond, golden-tinted.
That house is where I learned to ride a bike for the first time, at my eighth birthday party, with a cake-shaped hat on my head and the sweet taste of vanilla icing thick in the back of my throat. That house is where I collected green-skinned walnuts for years, from the big old tree in the front that stretched nearly over our roof, in wicker baskets for my grandmother to peel and put in pans to bake. I celebrated six, maybe seven, birthdays there, and every Christmas had a new, interactive advent calendar on my mother’s Windows 7 desktop.
I was stung by bees there for the first time. I still remember the way I ran to the house barefoot, crying, clutching my finger while my babysitter got out the Neosporin and bandages. I remember the day my sister knocked out two front teeth on our coffee table and I sprawled out across my grandmother’s bed yet again, sitting in silence, the only sound that of her needle going through torn t-shirt fabric as we waited for my parents to return from the hospital.
(It’s equal parts good and bad; the strength of those kinds of memories makes them stick, attached to the inside of the ribs or the beating of the heart, even if there are times when I want nothing more than to rip them out. It’s that poignant sense of not knowing, not understanding, because I was eight and all I witnessed was blood and crying and my mother screaming, and the hush that fell over the house once my parents pulled out of the driveway and left me behind.) I still recall the eerie quiet that followed, the silence as sharp as one of my brother’s Swiss Army knives, as I lost myself in a down comforter and my grandmother threaded together our mistakes.
Everyone grows up somewhere. Everyone has that place where they scraped their knees on the asphalt for the first time, or befriended the dogs down the street that always escaped their pen, or ran, laughing, through the flowerbeds, their floral pinafore covered in mud, while their father chased them with a hose and their grandmother bemoaned the mess. Everyone grows up and grows on. Everyone comes together somewhere. And everyone leaves something behind.
I left pieces of myself there, more important pieces than the shed out back that my father built or the dent in the wall where I cracked my head open playing tag. I left more than just my blood in the concrete. I mourn more now than I did at eight years old, on a cool night in September, wearing too-big gardening gloves and burying the dead blue jay I found under the birch tree with two broken wings.
That house was not a building, it was a scrapbook. It was a portal to passed days. It was a place where my grandmother’s mind was sharp as a tack and I could expect to see her, every day, a gardening apron on as she crouched next to the crocus beds out back and pulled weeds. It was a place where time had no meaning and the concept of an end did not exist in my elementary school mind. Where the only things I ever lost were Fisher Price plastic figures and pocket change sinking between the couch cushions.
It’s been eight years. I talked to my grandmother for the last time around Thanksgiving.
She didn’t fold laundry anymore; her hands were too shaky, her eyes too uncertain. Her stamp collection was upstairs, in the condo’s attic, behind a dozen other boxes from her latest and final move. She had a small booklet of photographs kept behind plastic, pictures from her wedding day, school photos of my mother and uncle and aunt to remind her who these people were. She clung onto expired coupons like they were tickets to salvation. There were no flower beds outside. There was no basket of sewing supplies, scraps to string back together, and no spare buttons for me to scatter across her bedspread.
We spoke; it was not about anything meaningful, but she seemed happy anyway, in a world where she was a teenager instead of in her seventies and I was a friendly stranger. She was not the same woman I had known when I was young, the same woman I had watched while rolling around on her bed in the rays of sunshine spilling through the front window, her nimble hands straightening out the pillowcases. She was not the gardener or the comforter or the homemaker anymore. She no longer seemed like the woman she had been in her wedding photos, or the mother my mother cherished so deeply, or the same grandmother I remembered, so full of life it overflowed.
But she was happy.
Life was not a burden for her. She lived, insulated, surrounded by people who loved her more than anything, even if she could not understand why. She lived a full life, even if it came to an unfair end and her mind fell apart like a threadbare quilt. She lived with a full heart. And I know that even if she couldn’t recall my name, she never forgot that she loved me.
When you get older, everything moves more quickly. I wonder how quickly my grandmother’s final days passed for her. I wonder if she felt like a child again, too, clinging onto memories of younger times and living in sepia-tinted photographs. I wonder if she thought of her childhood home and her childhood memories and all the little pieces of herself that she had scattered the world with.
The last time I visited the house in Connecticut was years ago. The new owners chopped down the walnut tree in the front yard, remodeled the back shed, and refurnished the rooms inside that I had grown to love so much. The yard was not nearly as endless as I remembered. I almost didn’t recognize it, car idling in the driveway as I searched for any of the landmarks I remembered, as the picture reformed and refragmented. But while it was not the house I knew, it was the house of another child, and I left it behind but still carry the memories with me.
Long after the last time I visited the house in Connecticut, I stood on my back porch—not a patio, not the gray stone of my childhood home, but my back porch nonetheless—and I thought, for the first time in years, about the blue jay. I thought about my grandmother’s gardening gloves. And in the light of the afternoon sun, remembering the birch tree grave I had dug alone so many years before, I thought about ends.
Eleanor DelSignore is a college freshman and former NH Teen Poet Laureate. Her work has been published in Marias at Sampaguitas, Cliché Teen Journal, Stardust Literary Journal, Footprints on Jupiter, and others. She was the first place winner in the 2022 Sally Boland Essay Prize contest, and her work has also been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She is currently double majoring in Criminology and English.
Thread Wing
When I was very young, my grandmother used to tell me that life passes more quickly than I’d think. I would sit perched on her bed, fistfuls of quilt bunched up in my child-sized hands, watching her fold laundry or painstakingly paste stamps into her collection’s albums. When you get older, everything moves more quickly.
At the time, I did not believe her.
I grew up in Connecticut, my parents both ‘retired’ at 35 and 39, in a house my family renovated and would later sell. The yard stretched out to the fields and the woods, and it felt infinite as I sat on our new back patio, watching my father and uncle pat down the churned-up soil of the back gardens. The woods were endless; the swing set, once turquoise and now a rusted brownish-red, was a trip to another world every time I kicked my feet and swung higher, higher, higher. Sometimes I would let go as I reached the very peak of my arc, daring it to let me fall. (I never did; or maybe I did and I don’t remember it.)
My memories of that house are fond, golden-tinted.
That house is where I learned to ride a bike for the first time, at my eighth birthday party, with a cake-shaped hat on my head and the sweet taste of vanilla icing thick in the back of my throat. That house is where I collected green-skinned walnuts for years, from the big old tree in the front that stretched nearly over our roof, in wicker baskets for my grandmother to peel and put in pans to bake. I celebrated six, maybe seven, birthdays there, and every Christmas had a new, interactive advent calendar on my mother’s Windows 7 desktop.
I was stung by bees there for the first time. I still remember the way I ran to the house barefoot, crying, clutching my finger while my babysitter got out the Neosporin and bandages. I remember the day my sister knocked out two front teeth on our coffee table and I sprawled out across my grandmother’s bed yet again, sitting in silence, the only sound that of her needle going through torn t-shirt fabric as we waited for my parents to return from the hospital.
(It’s equal parts good and bad; the strength of those kinds of memories makes them stick, attached to the inside of the ribs or the beating of the heart, even if there are times when I want nothing more than to rip them out. It’s that poignant sense of not knowing, not understanding, because I was eight and all I witnessed was blood and crying and my mother screaming, and the hush that fell over the house once my parents pulled out of the driveway and left me behind.) I still recall the eerie quiet that followed, the silence as sharp as one of my brother’s Swiss Army knives, as I lost myself in a down comforter and my grandmother threaded together our mistakes.
Everyone grows up somewhere. Everyone has that place where they scraped their knees on the asphalt for the first time, or befriended the dogs down the street that always escaped their pen, or ran, laughing, through the flowerbeds, their floral pinafore covered in mud, while their father chased them with a hose and their grandmother bemoaned the mess. Everyone grows up and grows on. Everyone comes together somewhere. And everyone leaves something behind.
I left pieces of myself there, more important pieces than the shed out back that my father built or the dent in the wall where I cracked my head open playing tag. I left more than just my blood in the concrete. I mourn more now than I did at eight years old, on a cool night in September, wearing too-big gardening gloves and burying the dead blue jay I found under the birch tree with two broken wings.
That house was not a building, it was a scrapbook. It was a portal to passed days. It was a place where my grandmother’s mind was sharp as a tack and I could expect to see her, every day, a gardening apron on as she crouched next to the crocus beds out back and pulled weeds. It was a place where time had no meaning and the concept of an end did not exist in my elementary school mind. Where the only things I ever lost were Fisher Price plastic figures and pocket change sinking between the couch cushions.
It’s been eight years. I talked to my grandmother for the last time around Thanksgiving.
She didn’t fold laundry anymore; her hands were too shaky, her eyes too uncertain. Her stamp collection was upstairs, in the condo’s attic, behind a dozen other boxes from her latest and final move. She had a small booklet of photographs kept behind plastic, pictures from her wedding day, school photos of my mother and uncle and aunt to remind her who these people were. She clung onto expired coupons like they were tickets to salvation. There were no flower beds outside. There was no basket of sewing supplies, scraps to string back together, and no spare buttons for me to scatter across her bedspread.
We spoke; it was not about anything meaningful, but she seemed happy anyway, in a world where she was a teenager instead of in her seventies and I was a friendly stranger. She was not the same woman I had known when I was young, the same woman I had watched while rolling around on her bed in the rays of sunshine spilling through the front window, her nimble hands straightening out the pillowcases. She was not the gardener or the comforter or the homemaker anymore. She no longer seemed like the woman she had been in her wedding photos, or the mother my mother cherished so deeply, or the same grandmother I remembered, so full of life it overflowed.
But she was happy.
Life was not a burden for her. She lived, insulated, surrounded by people who loved her more than anything, even if she could not understand why. She lived a full life, even if it came to an unfair end and her mind fell apart like a threadbare quilt. She lived with a full heart. And I know that even if she couldn’t recall my name, she never forgot that she loved me.
When you get older, everything moves more quickly. I wonder how quickly my grandmother’s final days passed for her. I wonder if she felt like a child again, too, clinging onto memories of younger times and living in sepia-tinted photographs. I wonder if she thought of her childhood home and her childhood memories and all the little pieces of herself that she had scattered the world with.
The last time I visited the house in Connecticut was years ago. The new owners chopped down the walnut tree in the front yard, remodeled the back shed, and refurnished the rooms inside that I had grown to love so much. The yard was not nearly as endless as I remembered. I almost didn’t recognize it, car idling in the driveway as I searched for any of the landmarks I remembered, as the picture reformed and refragmented. But while it was not the house I knew, it was the house of another child, and I left it behind but still carry the memories with me.
Long after the last time I visited the house in Connecticut, I stood on my back porch—not a patio, not the gray stone of my childhood home, but my back porch nonetheless—and I thought, for the first time in years, about the blue jay. I thought about my grandmother’s gardening gloves. And in the light of the afternoon sun, remembering the birch tree grave I had dug alone so many years before, I thought about ends.
Eleanor DelSignore is a college freshman and former NH Teen Poet Laureate. Her work has been published in Marias at Sampaguitas, Cliché Teen Journal, Stardust Literary Journal, Footprints on Jupiter, and others. She was the first place winner in the 2022 Sally Boland Essay Prize contest, and her work has also been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She is currently double majoring in Criminology and English.