Tea and Fruitcake

It has been about a month since we have visited my grandma. Today on the way home from church, I called to set up a visit with her. I have to call now; she was getting confused and making Sunday dinners for us even when we told her we'd just be coming over for tea in the afternoons. A young voice - my mother's - answered Grandma's phone with "Tanner's", and I was momentarily thrown off by the contrast to the smoker's voice I'd been expecting. She put Grandma on the phone.
"Hi Grandma! How are you?"
"I'm good, how are you?"
"Good! We were wondering if we could set up a tea time with you today."
"A tee time? What was that?"
"We were wondering if we could come visit you today."
We worked out the details and hung up; it was after I hung up that I realized how the phrase "tea time" might have sounded like we were inviting Grandma out for a round of 18 holes on this sunny but cold November afternoon. After a lunch at Ryan's house, of chicken pot pie casserole, pickle relish, leftover cranberry bread from Thanksgiving, and apple sauce, with oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for dessert, and some reading/watching football/snoozing on the couches, we headed back into town to Grandma's house.

I didn't notice the charcoal shutters hung on the windows, but I did notice her new back door. It was white with a double-paned glass window, and looked solid and new and much warmer than the old door. We went in, and she was down in the Keeping Room, watching the football game. She had three teacups and a plate of sliced fruitcake set out on the dining room table for us. We shed our coats, gloves and scarves and sat down to tea with her.

She pointed out the basalm Christmas wreath on her front door. It's made with real branches. Every Christmas her oldest son David and his wife Sandy send her a wreath from the L.L. Bean catalog.

Conversation with Grandma these days is a lot lighter and less reminiscent of the old days now. Ryan is with me, and we're only having tea: two factors that don't lead me into the tell-me-of-the-old-days questioning. But she poured our black tea into the teacups and we took the slices of fruitcake, which was studded with pecans and red and green candied cherries. We chatted about work and our apartment and other things. She has taken to volunteering at the nursing home my grandfather was at, because she had met so many people and made so many friends while he was kept there. Unfortunately, her first assignment as a volunteer worker was in the gift shop, which she doesn't like at all. "I don't want to be up there selling chocolate bars; I want to work with people," she says. Tomorrow she has an interview for a different position at the nursing home, hopefully one that will get her away from the candy bars and into the paths of people.

We talked about caning chairs; her front porch is crammed with chairs of all shapes and sizes, waiting to be restored. She had just finished a beautiful chair downstairs in the Keeping Room, with a delicate cane called carriage cane, so delicate you had to put varnish on the seat when it was finished to give it extra strength. She diluted the varnish with "mineral spirits" - a testament to the amazing things she has lying around her old house. She showed the chair to us, showed us where she took it apart and repaired the broken bits with glue, refinished the wood, and the underside of the caning. The chair is beautiful.

We didn't stay long this time, and as we were standing by the back door getting ready to leave, she pointed out the new door to us and the cool feature it has: blinds that are inside the double-paned windows, which are controlled by a slider to the right and can be lowered and lifted and opened and closed, all within the glass panes. She always has a knack for things that are quite practical and useful, but not without also being aesthetically pleasing, beautiful.

She wanted to know if I was going to "do any baking this year". I'm tickled by that question- by the idea of planning for a year's baking or even a season's baking. To me it seems quaint. She wanted to give me an extra bag of chocolate chips she had got on sale recently and wouldn't be able to use this winter. She couldn't find them, though.

We said our goodbyes and headed out the nice shiny new back door, crunched the gravel under our feet on our way to the car, and drove off. She waved to us from the window, as usual.