Me and my cousin Candi at Liberty House Cafe in Asheville
Last Sunday I met my cousin Candi for a blustery walk around Beaver Lake in Asheville. She was in nearby Maggie Valley visiting my aunt and uncle, and I was recuperating from a post-COVID-booster day on the couch. I was only operating at about 75% when we got there, but the frigid October air and a start from a ghoul sighting woke me right up.
You can’t really tell, but this ghoul was about 12’ high
Beaver Lake is a manmade lake in North Asheville, bordered by a popular walking path and bird sanctuary. It was drizzling and windy, and we were too busy talking for me to stop and take a picture, but this is what the lake looked like the first time I walked it last January.
Despite the fact that I’d only met Candi two other times, I found it easy to talk to her. We shared recollections and impressions of our grandmother Amelia, a legendary beauty and gracious hostess who lived well into her 90s despite being an avid smoker most of her life.
My grandmother Amelia
For those of you who have not thoroughly memorized the flow chart of all of my relatives, Amelia is my birthmother’s mother. Candi grew up living close by to her in Florida and knew her well, but I had only a handful of visits with her. The last time I saw her was for her 85th birthday celebration, when she met my son for the first time.
My adoptive mother’s mother died long before I was born, and I was not close to my father’s mother. I don’t have any childhood recollections of that grandmother delighting in my presence, but I got to imagine what it would have been like with Amelia when I watched her playing on the floor with my then eleven-month-old son.
Although I barely knew Amelia, I felt loved by her. The very first weekend I met her, when I was 21, she called me from the bedroom out to breakfast, urging me to eat with the others before the food got cold. When I went back into the bedroom to make the bed, I found it already made. I felt guilty that she’d beaten me to it, but I realized she’d wanted to make it for me.
When I returned to her home in Florida 14 years later with my infant son, she’d stocked her living room with stuffed animals, baby books, and toys that lit up and made loud noises. I don’t think her knees were the best by then, but that didn’t stop her from crawling alongside Jack on the shag carpet as he chewed on toys that he then discarded and kissed his reflection in the glass-top coffee table.
I’d enjoyed Amelia’s homemade lemon bars during that visit, and I must have told her, because a couple weeks after I returned home, I received a letter with the recipe.
Years later, The Daughter and I made Amelia’s lemon squares the winter our home was the Dessert House on L.A.’s Historic West Adams Progressive Dinner Tour, and they were a hit.
After our walk, I took Candi to Liberty House Cafe, one of my favorite brunch spots in Asheville. We split a ginger molasses cookie as we drank our coffee, eventually moving on to quiche and a butternut squash and kale salad. Having grown up in our biological family, she obviously knows a lot more about them than I do, but we cobbled together our individual narratives, trying to fill in some gaps.
There are some question marks in our grandmother’s background, which perhaps accounted for the slightly enigmatic quality that hovered around her. She was at once inviting and distancing.
I have a vivid memory of her hugging me goodbye at at the airport, after our first visit when I was twenty-one. A few minutes later I went in for a second hug, and she pulled away. I felt embarrassed that I had asked for more than she was comfortable giving, but as I remembered this moment, over brunch with Candi, I recognized that same ambivalent quality in myself.
I have often been told that I’m aloof, hard to get to know. What isn’t apparent is that I long to get close, yet often feel as if an invisible tide is pulling me back. It’s something that I’m trying to change about myself. Life is too short — especially now, in my 60s — to fritter away by not fully showing up.
I used to think this ambivalent attachment quirk was a byproduct of adoption, but now I wonder if it is instead a trait handed down to me by the grandmother I hardly knew. A few weeks ago, my cousin Sandy (adoptive, and not related to Amelia) picked up the framed photo of my grandmother as a young girl that sits on my kitchen counter. She glanced from the photo up to me, then back again, several times, her eyes widening with each back-and-forth.
“I know,” I said, “she looks a lot like me.”
“She is you,” Sandy said.
My grandmother Amelia
When I did my ancestral lineage repair sessions last spring, I learned that sometimes those of us who are alive can complete the tasks our ancestors couldn’t. But we have to pay attention to the clues they’re trying to send us from beyond the grave.
Is it a coincidence that I’ve seen Candi twice in the past month, when I hadn’t seen her since 1984? Is it happenstance that I moved to Asheville, just 45 minutes from her parents’ vacation home? Are we just two long-lost cousins connecting over our common grandmother — or was I supposed to pay close enough attention to what we were both saying, until one family memory crystallized, emerging from the rest?
That afternoon at the airport almost 40 years ago, when I felt Amelia pull away from me…maybe I’d misinterpreted the gesture when it happened. Maybe she didn’t actually want to keep her distance. Maybe she wanted to get closer, but didn’t know how.
I can’t say for sure, but when I think about what I do as a therapist — help people say the things that have gone unsaid, to feel seen in a way they’ve never been seen — I have to wonder if that was what Amelia really wanted.
Love the detailed recipe and the superb calligraphy. Of course, we are now all hoping for a small gift box of lemon squares for the holidays, With a hug, Or two.
Lovely. ❤️