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My Grandmother's Room     "I don't know where to begin, I'm sure glad you came home to help." My father stands in the doorway looking into the bedroom where his mother had slept for most of her long life. "Your mother wants me to convert this room into some kind of an exercise room, but she says it's up to me to get rid of your grandmother's memorabilia, she doesn't want to be the one responsible for dividing it up among your aunts."      I had spent all my formative years in this big old house on the top of the hill. It was known in Milltown as "The Parrington House" because for generations, the Parrington family had owned the mill and lived in the house. After my grandfather died, my father took over Parrington Mills and the Parrington House and we all moved in with his mother, our beloved Grandma Parrington.      I lived a comfortable and privileged childhood. My young mother was cute and flighty and content to allow her mother-in-law to run the household and the servants in the manner of the fading stratified society of Milltown, thereby keeping herself from conflict with my three bossy aunts. My stocky pugnacious Grandfather Parrington had been an iron fisted "gentleman of the old school" who lived for his mill and the pride of his "Fine Old American Family Name" and the lifestyle that went with it. He was thirty years older than my grandmother, so I hardly remember him. I was unimportant to him anyway because I was a girl, but he did take an interest in my brother because he would eventually be the only Parrington to carry on the family line. My father, who was totally unlike him---slender, dark skinned, gentle and sensitive---often lamented that he wished one of his bossy sisters had been born male so that he wouldn't have been the only heir to take over Parrington Mills, which he hated. What he had wanted to be was a musician. My grandmother had been a talented player herself and despite my grandfather's disapproval, she had encouraged my father's passion for classical Spanish guitar. Even when she was quite old, I have memories of lying in my bed listening to strains of Flamenco and Fado lyrics coming from the gazebo where my father and grandmother were entertaining guests.     In her later years my grandmother was forced to spend much of her time in her comfortable bedroom with the blue walls, blue curtains and blue canopied bed. She loved the color blue. Even if she wore a dress of another color she still added a blue accessory somewhere. I once asked her why she always wore something blue and she told me, "In memory of someone from long ago." I asked her "Who" but she changed the subject so abruptly that I never asked her again. So now here I am in her blue room because my father has asked me to help sort out her possessions before the decorators come in to paint it sunshine yellow.      The heirloom jewelry has already been distributed among the aunt's, so mostly all that is left now is a chest of drawers full of knickknacks and souvenirs. "How on earth did this thing get in her bedroom?" My father picks up a heart-shaped silver tea strainer.     "Grandma's tea ball! I'm keeping this for myself." I take it from him and cup my hands around it. And a rush of memories comes surging back.     I am eight years old again. Grandma is braiding my hair. "Grandma why do you keep a tea strainer on your window sill?"     "It's my magic ball" she laughs. " In the evening on moonlight nights I sit by my window and watch the darkness come over the rose garden. I rub my silver tea ball, and suddenly out in the moonlight I see a pretty young girl sitting alone on the stone bench. Then from the shadows a dark handsome young man appears and whispers something in her ear. He pulls her up from the bench and hand in hand, they walk down the path to the gazebo and disappear into the dusk."      "What does he whisper about?" I ask.      "He tell her he loves her."      "Then what do they do?"      "I'm not telling," she laughs again.      "Where did you get the magic tea ball?"      "It was given to me by a young man I knew long ago."      "What happened to him?" I ask.      "He had to go away, far away, back to his home in Spain." And before I can ask her more, she changes the subject again and tells me to stop asking questions and go out and play.        My father says it's time for us to quit. We finish doing the dressing table and open the drawer on the night table.     "That's funny," he says, holding up an old torn photo album. "I don't remember ever seeing this one. It's falling apart." I sit on the bed and begin to open the pages of brittle sepia colored photographs, some so faded with the years that I can only make out the outlines.     "These are pictures of Grandma," I say excitedly, "How beautiful she was! And here's her wedding picture. But she was so young. Just a girl. Grandfather looks like a middle aged man already. . . . . I wonder why she married him?."     "Didn't your mother ever tell you?" my father says, "She was only sixteen. It was an arranged marriage, which wasn't uncommon in those days. Her father was old-fashioned European and had eight daughters to marry off. He owed money to your grandfather and they struck a deal. She told your mother about it just before she had her stroke. I had never heard about it before that, either. "     "How horrible! My poor sweet young grandmother." I am almost in tears.     "It's strange to think, though", says my father, "If she hadn't married your grandfather, neither of us would be here in this room right now."     I turn some more pages of the album. Now the pictures are of my grandmother and her delicate bright-eyed, black-haired baby, my father. And successive family pictures include the sturdy chubby blonde babies who are my aunts. The last page of the album is blank, but the little sticky picture corners are still in place and I wonder where the picture has gone. While I am packing the album away in a box, it falls apart in my hands and the cover separates from its lining. As I try to fit the cardboard liner back into the cover I realize it isn't cardboard at all, it is the back of a photograph---the missing photograph! There is writing on it and I take it to the window to read the blurred message, which says, "My Blue Girl who is my love, I must go back now to Spain, it is too much sorrow to stay here and be forever only music teacher to you. I give you this silver heart to remind you of mine." I turn it over and the faded photograph on the other side is a picture of a dark young man who is the absolute image of my father.     My father has gone down to the storeroom. While I wait for him to return, I go to the window and sit in my grandmother's chair and hold the heart-shaped silver tea ball cupped in my hands. I look outside. There is no moon but by now dusk is falling. And as I look into the rose garden, I see a beautiful young girl in a blue gown waiting on the stone bench. Out of the shadows there appears a dark young man who looks like my father. He bends over and whispers to the girl. He takes her hand and they walk together into the misty evening, and disappear down the path towards the gazebo.     When I was eight I had asked my grandmother,  "What did they do then?" But this time I don't need to ask.                                                                              ~~Daphne Wilson                                                                                  ©2001 l

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