Portals

Reflections on my grandma's house, and how we create space for what matters most

My grandma (standing, right) with three generations of family in her living room, 1953.

“Grandma!” I shouted, running to the tiny woman with wispy white hair, ruddy cheeks, a labyrinth of wrinkles, and twinkling blue eyes. As I threw my arms around her, I received an iron hug that could almost break me. Though I was twice her height, she was multiple times stronger, in muscle and will. This woman could lift a truck if she needed to.

Her olive green car smelled musty, like her basement.  As she and my dad chatted in the front seat – we were back from China, where he worked as a diplomat – my sister and I picked at the faux leather upholstery, seat belts loose around our waists, jostling together as we swerved, like a couple of loose apples.  Grandma sat on a booster seat, barely able to see over the dash – but she insisted on driving anyway.

Eventually, the gravel would crackle under us as we pulled up to her house in darkness, illuminated by moonlight and Lake Minnetonka. The garage door, once opened, was a cave, and her house, a portal.

A portal. You know: the kind of place you could walk into and feel instantly at home, every worn surface steeped in memories, seasoned with history.  Once you walked through the door, you became one with it, entirely at home, slipping into its rhythms as easily as Lake Minnetonka’s gentle waves lapped her yard. 

This black and white clapboard house was built as a summer cottage in the 1800s, but my great grandparents, having lost everything in the Great Depression, made it their year-round home. They raised my grandmother here, along with her three brothers, and she in turn raised four children there, since by then her parents had moved to an alfalfa ranch in Lancaster, California.

Inside, the house held stories, none more present than my grandmother’s pottery. My grandmother loved clay, and kept a kiln in her basement alongside the fishing rods and tackle, a metal canoe, oars, tools, and a washing machine and dryer. Her blue, green and brown pottery was everywhere – planters hanging in the window, a butter dish, heavy plates and mugs, wind chimes. 

In the living room, a knobby blue woolen couch gave just enough when you sat on it to be comfortable for a read, until it started to get scratchy.  The worn leather lazy boy squeaked when reclined. My grandmother could be found there most evenings, poring over a book by a dim reading light. She loved to read, and every Christmas would send each of us a book inscribed with a message, wrapped in newspaper and twine.

Mornings brought us to the front porch, facing the lake, where we would arrive at the old farm table to find slices of cantaloupe with a tiny wedge of lime, and an ancient toaster making toast that we would butter and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar from one of her handmade pots.   In the corner was an old wooden doll house, dolls, and blocks.

Just off the kitchen was a small greenhouse. My grandmother loved plants, and my grandfather’s family had once owned a nursery in Wisconsin. It was humid and smelled like dirt, with cobwebs and spiders, and dust on the glass. Outside, my grandmother kept a garden of orange tulips and tiger lilies abutting a walking trail – once a train track which, as my dad told it, used to rattle everyone awake at night as the train hurtled past.

My grandmother in her garden

Music lived here, too. A corner nook contained a piano, and on it, a basket of instruments - rattles, drums, harmonicas, and tribal pieces from my Aunt Ginny’s Peace Corps days in Ghana. My grandfather had played the violin and piano, and was known for gathering the family around the piano to sing folk songs and ditties, popular in their day.

On a small shelf next to a round black Civil War era dining table, my grandma kept her birding log and binoculars.  She was an ornithologist by training, one of the first women to graduate with a Masters from the University of Minnesota. Despite raising four children on her own in an era when laundry was done with a washboard and basin, she kept up her intellectual pursuits, observing birds, reading, writing letters, even penning a pamphlet on ambush bugs and photographing wildflowers for a guidebook she co-authored with my grandfather.

At the top of the narrow stairs leading up to the second floor were murals painted by my Aunt Ginny, an angel weighing good and evil. That my grandmother had encouraged her daughter to paint the walls, which most parents try to avoid, was testament to who she was: a supporter of the arts and of her children, never precious about material things.

Books were everywhere, with thumbed pages and frayed and faded spines. A built-in bookcase in the narrow upstairs hall was packed with stacks of National Geographic magazines from the 1950s and 1960s. These pages helped inspire my dad to travel abroad, join the army, and then the Foreign Service.

At day’s end, we grandkids found our place in the upstairs sleeping porch, crammed into four single beds on creaking metal frames, wrapped in worn out quilts, heads resting on flat pillows that had seen fluffier days. One side was all screen windows; at night, we could make out stars through the huge whispering tree, waves breathing us to sleep.

This modest, timeworn house was a haven for books, art, music, play, nature — and the wide, wondering world. It was steeped in water, trees, land, snow, and sun. Freezing in winter, covered in snow banks; steady through Midwest thunderstorms and tornadoes careening across the lake; quiet in summer sunshine as we grandkids ran barefoot across the grass to lay belly-down on the neighbor’s dock, searching for sunfish, and for ourselves.

That house held us, shaped us. Its magic lives on in memory — and in the questions it leaves behind.

Today, I ask myself — and I invite you to ask yourself:

How can you create a portal like this in your life?

A space for nature, art, music, conversation, curiosity, and care?

How can you become that kind of spacious home for yourself and others?