"Oma's Heart"

      We sat on my parents' bed, my Oma, me and my little sister, looking through a small duffle bag of jewelry that had temporarily lived in my parents room since the storm.  “Larry bought me this necklace in Pennsylvania,” she said, holding up an amber heart, “and Uncle Tom bought me this ring for Mother’s Day one year.”  (The ring still had a tag on it.)  In this small duffle bag were about thirty small jewelry boxes, each containing a piece of jewelry given to my Oma at some point in her life by someone that she loved.  “Okay, so we have four gold hearts here,” Oma said, “I want both of you to pick the one that you like the best. So, when you wear it, you can always think of me.”  “I don’t need to remember you yet! All I have to do is stop over!” I smiled.  “Yeah, but you never know how much longer you have,” Oma said.  It felt like the process that you go through after someone dies, perusing through all of her old jewelry and choosing something to keep to remember her by, except that the owner of this particular collection of jewelry was sitting there with us, watching us choose.

I knew, even before I looked at the selection, which heart I would claim as my own.  “This one,” I said, picking up the largest gold heart, the one with the dent in it.  “You know you don’t have to pick that one, Kristi, you can pick a different one,” Oma said.  “No, I want this one,” I smiled.  “Are you sure?” she asked.  “Yep, positive.”

We sat at Oma’s kitchen table, as we always did when we went to her house, three generations of women drinking peppermint tea and eating cookies.  I looked around her kitchen, as I had hundreds of times before, admiring the atmosphere. Above the cabinets was a line of artificial “greenery” I guess you’d call it, behind which stood upwards of ten German beer steins.  Almost every inch of wall space was taken up by hanging plants or paintings of pig-tailed children.  On the counters were gingerbread men figurines and Pillsbury Doughboy dolls.  Small, carved wooden plaques with hearts and sayings written in German on them filled in the spaces in between.   

Oma, who could never seem to sit down, got up once again from her seat at the table.  “Oh! I found something today while I was up the attic I want to show you!” She shuffled past us and out of the cramped kitchen, into the living room of her one bedroom bungalow.  Every room of her tiny house was meticulously decorated from floor to ceiling.  In her living room, alone, stood three glass cabinets filled with thousands of dollars worth of German Hummel figurines and dolls.  “Sometimes I just take them out and rearrange them for fun,” Oma would say.  On one of the chairs that no one sat in was a baby doll, dressed according to the season.  In her attic, she had a large suitcase filled with baby clothes, purchased specifically for this doll.  I thought she was nuts.  “I just like taking care of things,” she’d always say, laughing, “It makes me happy.”

She picked up a small tin box from an end table and brought it back into the kitchen.  On the outside were pictures of buildings in her hometown of Nuremburg, Germany, lined in a gold trim.  Inside the box were pictures, letters and newspaper clippings of the past, the distant past.  Oma took out an envelope, addressed to her, dirtied and aged, the edges torn and weathered. 

“What is it?” my Mom asked.  “A letter my father wrote to me from Germany. There are a bunch of them in here. And pictures.”  She took out a small postcard with a printed picture on the front of a man in a tailored suit with a top hat and cane and what looked like tap shoes; across the top in bold lettering it read, “Emil the Great!”  “Look at this!  That’s my father, there; he was a professional dancer.”  I hadn’t known my great-grandfather was a dancer, I vaguely remembered someone telling me that he was an illusionist, which I doubted was even remotely close to the truth.  “My father used to dance around our apartment when I was young, sometimes with my mother.  I remember when I first moved here with daddy, my father would send me letters begging me to come home.  I didn’t listen. Boy, was I stupid!”

I stood at the top of the dead-end street, the chill of the October  breeze penetrating the thin layers of my hoodie and t-shirt underneath. People I didn’t know on either side of me, residents of what we once called Cliffwood Way, stared blankly at the street they once called home.  I watched my dad, work boots and garbage bags tied up to each of his knees, wading through almost three feet of water, pulling my mother and aunt in a small boat behind him.  Where once houses were accessible by car or by foot, transportation of an aquatic nature was now required.  I cringed in disgust at the brown and murky sewer water in front of me.  The solemn faces and overall silence of the crowd was almost unbearable.  Thank God, Oma isn’t here, I thought, as I helped my parents unload muck-covered memories from my Oma’s house out of the boat and into the back of our Chevy Tahoe. 

“What does it look like inside?” I asked my Mom.  “Not good,” she replied, “All of the furniture was turned upside down. The refrigerator is knocked over and there’s spoiled food everywhere.  Not that it matters, everything below the four foot water line is covered in a thick layer of mud.  But you know what’s really weird? You know all those porcelain angels Oma had on her dresser in her bedroom?  The whole room is a mess, but that dresser moved in a way that when it fell it must have floated forward and tipped backward against the wall; all of the angels are dry and unbroken.”  “What are the chances of that?” I replied.  In my mind, I just could not picture the disaster inside 4 Cliffwood Way that my mom was describing.  I thought about the last time I sat in that kitchen and walked past that bedroom, everything in its place, as it always was, gone in a matter of twenty-four hours.  Sandy- 1, Cliffwood Way – 0.

“Kristi, could you do me a big favor?” Oma asked.  “Sure, what is it?” “You know that picture you showed me of Uncle Wayne the other day? Do you think you could print me a copy of that? I want to put it in a frame on my table with my other pictures.”  This was a very minor favor, but meant everything to the mother of a dead son.  My Uncle Wayne had just recently passed away.  For years, no one had really seen much of him, even though he and his family lived only a few miles away.  There was always an excuse as to why they couldn’t make it to holiday parties, birthdays, you name it.  Now the only way my Oma could see him was by photograph and memory.  I glanced at waist-high table, it's pure white table runner was almost entirely covered by intricate gold picture frames, vases that held meticulously arranged artificial flowers in them, and the occasional Annalee doll or wooden German figurine.  In the picture frames were pictures of my great-grandparents, my great-great grandmother, my favorite picture of my mom and Uncle Drew with my great-grandfather, Emil, in Germany, dressed in a little German dress and lederhosen, and more recent photos of me, my sister and cousins.  "Of course I can, I'll run to Walmart and print it tomorrow," I said.

A few days later, I brought Oma the picture she asked for in a gold frame to match the rest of the frames on her end table.  “That’s my Wayne,” she said, hugging the picture to her chest before placing it next to the black and white photographs of her long deceased parents and grandmother.  “Thank you so much, honey,” she said, moving in to hug me.  “No big deal,” I said.  Twenty nine cents and five minutes at Walmart and you’d think I'd moved the world. 

It was a bigger mess than I thought.  My mother brought three large plastic totes into our kitchen, overflowing with muck-covered memories.  Their contents: a large jewelry box, a variety of tins filled with pictures and letters, a pile of gold picture frames, wooden gnomes from Germany still soggy with a thick layer of a brown mess of who-knows-what and already growing some sort of mold, piles of Hummel knick-knacks that all managed to escape damage despite the fact that the entire china cabinet had toppled over during the water surge. 

My sister and I began to go through the mess with every intention of cleaning it up to as close to it’s original state as possible.  Oma was still in New Hampshire, she hadn’t seen any of it yet.  We told her minimal details; she knew that the life she once had in the house that she lived in for 67 years was over, at least for now, but as I looked at just a fraction of the destruction sitting in our kitchen, I almost didn’t want her to come home. 

My sister and I spent upwards of eight hours separating wet pictures, trying not to rip them, rinsing and drying them off in hopes to salvage as many as we could.  In those large tins were over eighty years of memories, pictures of so many people, some that I knew very well and some that I never had the pleasure to meet.  We laughed at pictures of our Oma in her sixties dressed up in German frocks at Oktoberfest festivals, pictures of our mother, aunts and uncles as babies, now smeared memories.  I reached into one of the plastic containers and pulled out the gold picture frames, among them, the picture of my Uncle Wayne.  The cardboard backing of the frame was no longer wet, but the toxic blue and purple streams dancing menacingly through the once purely black sea showed proof of water damage, and the inks in the picture ran like the tears I was trying to hold back.  I wanted so much to hug it to my chest the way that my Oma had done when I first gave it to her, but the risk of possible sewer sludge staining my clothes quickly changed my mind. It’s okay, I thought, I can print a new picture and buy a new frame, no big deal.

 That night, like the previous nights since the storm, my parents, sister and I sat by candlelight watching a movie on a laptop that we charged at a friend’s house.  It was cold and we dressed in layers, sipping hot soup thanks to our gas stove.  My mother’s cell phone rang, it was Oma.  The phone went through the chain of command, starting with my mother and eventually making its way to me.  “Hi Oma,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.  “Hi, honey,” she replied, “Listen, I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the work you and Stephanie have been doing to clean up all of my things.  It means the world to me, and I am so lucky to have you girls.  I don’t know what I would do without you.”  She was already crying.  “Oma, it’s no big deal, really,” I said.  “It’s just a terrible thing, my poor house.  I just want to be there with everyone. I feel so helpless here. At least there I could be doing something to help clean up.”  I didn’t want to say this to her, but I knew that it was better that she stay where she was for now.  “I know Oma, but we’ve got it under control.  Don’t worry,” I said.  “My heart hurts, Kristi.  I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to be back in my house.  I know it was little, and maybe not much to some people, but it was my little house.”  I had never heard her this upset before, and it scared me.  I wanted nothing more than to be able to give her her house back, and all of its contents in exactly the way she had them before.  Now, I felt helpless too.  When I hung up the phone, my mom asked me how she was with me.  I couldn’t get out the words to tell her, so I just cried.

We stood in my parent's kitchen, piles of once soppy wet pictures, now dry, but a little wrinkly, on the table in front of us.  “Look at all these pictures,” Oma said, “I didn’t know I had so many!”  She thumbed through a pile of old black and white photos.  “Those were the good old days, huh?” she smiled, solemnly.  “I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t born until probably forty years later!” I laughed. “Good point,” she chuckled.  “Oh! I found a picture the other day that I wanted to show you!” I said, searching the piles of pictures.  It was a picture of me as a baby, sitting in her lap.  “Here!” I said, handing it to her.  “How cute is that?” she replied, “I remember that shirt I had on, and I still have that necklace!”  For a moment, she was the old Oma again. 

“I want to tell you something about this picture,” Oma said, almost laughing.  “Do you see that heart necklace I’m wearing?” “Yeah,” I said, curiously. “That heart necklace always makes me think of you.  Do you want to know why?” she asked. “Why?” I probed. “The day that this picture was taken, I was holding you and you must have loved my necklace so much that you grabbed it and stuck it right in your mouth and bit it.  It’s gold, but it’s hollow in the middle and you dented it with the only two teeth you had in your mouth! So now, every time I go through my jewelry and see it, I think of you and how you dented my favorite heart necklace!”  I could not control my laughter.  “Whoops! Sorry!” I smiled.  “It’s okay, I love ya,” she said, leaning over to give me a hug..

We sat on my parents' bed looking through a small duffle bag of jewelry.  “Okay, so we have four gold hearts here,” Oma said, “I want both of you to pick the one that you like the best. So, when you wear it, you can always think of me.”  I knew, even before I looked at the selection, which heart I would claim as my own.  “This one,” I said, picking up the largest gold heart, the one with the dent in it.  “Are you sure?” she asked.  “Yep, positive,” I replied.  “Okay,” Oma said, smiling as she packed away the leftover jewelry.  “Thanks, Oma,” my sister and I said.  “Oh, it’s no big deal,” she replied.