My grandmother was Frances June Merritt, and she lived as if the work of her hands and the shape of her character were the same thing.
She grew flowers not because a garden was required of her, but because she thought living beauty had a purpose all its own.
Her kitchen was a room in which every object belonged somewhere, and that somewhere counted. The cast iron hung by size on hooks she put up herself in 1974. The spice jars carried her handwriting and sat in alphabetical order because that was how she treated whatever she loved: with precision, and with intent.
When I stayed with her, she made pancakes on Sunday mornings.
She made them the same way each time, in the same ceramic bowl, with the same wooden spoon worn darker on one side from years of stirring. She put them on the same blue plates, two of which were chipped at the rim, plates she kept because they had always been hers and the chips belonged to their story.
The lake house was the place where she was most herself.
I am saying that plainly, because everything that follows rests on it. Not the house in town, where she spent the school year while she was still teaching, and later the winters, when the cold sat harder on her than it once had.
The lake house—bought with my grandfather before I was born, the summer ground of the whole family for as long as anyone could recall—was where Frances June Merritt was complete.
In 1982, the year my mother was born, she put flowers along the south fence, and she tended them every summer after that.
The garden was not formal and not especially planned. It was the garden of a woman who set out what she loved and let it grow as it would. Across forty years it became something particular and impossible to replace: the piled-up choices of four decades of a person who knew her own affections.
She left the lake house to me.
Not to my mother. Not to my aunt. Not to the cousins who had also spent summers there. To me.
She told me why once, while she was still well, sitting with me on the porch looking at the water. She said: you’re the one who sees it the way I see it.
I did not fully understand her then.
I do now.
She died in the October of my twenty-sixth year. The house became mine. In the seven years since, I have kept it as she kept it. Not as a museum. It is a house I live in, use, and love.
But I keep it as something that honors what it was, something that knows what it means to maintain what the people before you made with care.
The blue plates are still there, chips included.
My husband Thomas and I spend weekends and summers there. We have added a few things. We have replaced what needed replacing.
The cast iron still hangs by size on her hooks, and the spice jars still wear her handwriting, because I have never found a reason to change them and do not expect to find one.
Thomas’s family is a different kind of family from mine.
