Happy families are all alike. – Leo Tolstoy
The framed cross-stitch on Granny’s kitchen wall finally caught my eye after I learned to read. Like her pancakes with yogurt, her peach-chicken tacos and her pork chops with kale, the motto filled me with comfort. We were a happy family, weren’t we? Granny, Aunt Annie and me. I envisioned other kitchens like ours, the meals served with a warm, laconic “There you go, precious,” and my day’s chores listed for my agreement.
When I got to be ten, though, I’d been in other kitchens, some crusted with baked-on crud, others fancier but with anger in the air and stinky beer cans in the wastebaskets. Most had more than one kid – and either a mom or a mother and dad. I asked Granny, were other families unhappy because they were not like us? She smiled. “What the man said, sweetheart,” she said, patting my head.
In high school I discovered who Tolstoy was, a Russian author who portrayed clashing armies and mixed-up lovers in brick-sized novels. I also learned that in a trick called irony, writers sometimes put words together meaning the opposite of what they said. Or just getting you to think. We obviously didn’t have a happy family, with my Mom in prison for stealing and Uncle Bill abandoning all of us. We would have been giddy with togetherness had those two come back, right? “Life is complicated, dear,” Granny replied, giving me a side-eye.
Years later, when Granny went into hospice and I visited her empty kitchen, shadowy with spiderwebs, I examined the now-grayed lavender, pink and yellow needlepoint, so precise and meticulous. Being tall enough now to reach it, I unhooked it from the wall and took it to Granny’s bedside with a litany of grown-up questions. She silenced them when her eyes fluttered open like paper lifted by a breeze. “Hello, love,” she whispered. That was all she could manage.
Marcia Yudkin publishes the weekly substack, Introvert Upthink. (https://www.introvertupthink.com).
