Home is where the daydream is

For a split second, it was all too much.

I had a car full of groceries and I was frustrated with the traffic, tired of waiting for a break to join the long line of cars driving north through the city. I was out of patience with the grumbling of the bored teenagers in the back seat.

I was tired and hungry and I wanted to go home. Not to my house with the loads of dirty laundry, blinking phone messages and bills to pay. But home the way it still shines in my memory.

I wanted, just once more, to park my car under the tall shade tree and walk into the kitchen to find my grandparents sitting at the table, a pot of fresh coffee between them.

My grandfather would stand up, taking his sturdy cane – the cane I keep in the umbrella stand by my front door now – and lead my children, who are in this daydream small and fresh-scrubbed again, out to admire his garden.

They would walk down the neat rows, between hillocks of red clay, picking vegetables still warm from the afternoon sun.

I imagined my children running down to the creek in the woods behind the house and my grandfather following, using his cane to point out and name the plants and rocks along the way.

If I could make it all come true, I would stay in the kitchen with my grandmother and drink a mug of strong coffee, black for her, cream and sugar for me. We would laugh and tell stories, the way women do.

And when my children ran back in to show me the treasures they had found, we would gather around the table and share one more meal.

The food would be simple and filling; roast beef and potatoes, tomatoes and corn from the garden. And there would be ice cream for dessert. There was always ice cream.

I would help my grandmother wash and dry the dishes and put everything away. Later, we would sit outside watching the day fade as the sky turned pink, and then crimson, with the setting sun. The children would chase the last of the lightning bugs and my grandfather’s little dog would be curled beside his chair.

We would spend the night tucked into sturdy beds, sleeping between sheets that had dried on a clothesline and still smelled like sunshine.

After a breakfast heavy enough to serve as ballast for the day’s travel, after one more hug from my grandfather and another kiss from my grandmother, I would put my children in the car and drive away.

Marcel Proust, in “Remembrance of Things Past,” described memory as a roadmap to people and places that no longer exist.

In the blink of an eye, in the space between cars on the highway, I had traveled a lifetime, following a map to the home that isn’t mine anymore, to see people who are long gone. People my children never met.

When the break in traffic came, I pulled out into the stream of cars, and as I drove I wondered if I have made that kind of home for my children.

Nothing else really matters. What’s important is that I leave them with the memory of a place that shines at the end of an invisible road; a road that will one day, if only in a daydream, lead them back to me.