Jackson Road
My husband and I are sitting at Le Nemours café in Paris in this golden hour in the first week of May. The air is warm, the sky – all day a smooth sheet of Robin’s egg blue – is mixing now with ribbons of yellows and pinks. Chestnut trees, already lush with bright, green leaves sway in the gentle breeze, in time with the music.
Throughout Paris and France, indeed the whole of Europe, the celebration of VE Day rings out, eighty years on.
We sip wine and enjoy the warm bread just placed before us as we watch a group of men and women dance to the music that fills Place Collette, that beautiful square just in front of Comedie Francaise and the courtyard that leads Palais Royale. How effortlessly the couples twirl, step up then back. They dip and tilt their hips at each other in unabashed, seductive moves; their bodies part then reunite in one quick pull and, back in each other’s arms, they begin again.
The crowd is jubilant. Some laugh. Some weep. Others seem caught between a memory and this moment, thinking about the courage of their ancestors. My gaze follows one woman as she dances with her partner; her hair swept up in a style from eight decades ago. She reminds me of my mother.
I, too, am between a memory and a moment and as I watch, smile, wonder, remember – my mind skims from past to present and back again, pondering thoughts connected by time and courage; faith and fear: What if the oldest had lived; would the youngest have been born? Would I? What if war had taken my father or uncle? What if I had not taken that American Literature class junior year of college where I met and fell in love with the Lost Generation?
And, what if we had not come to Paris, allowing our doubts and worries about taking this trip to take the better of us? How long will we feel the need to be in easy reach of our now grown children, themselves parents? They don’t ask that of us; neither should we.
Where and when were our seeds of courage planted and how did they take root?
When did my journey really begin? Can I trace the roads that led me here? And what, finally, helped ease my doubts amidst the chaos this world has unleashed to help allay the worries and board that plane?
I sip, watch. Wonder and remember.
~ ~ ~
Jackson Road runs east and west between the towns of Ann Arbor and Chelsea, Michigan. Once past Chelsea, heading west, the road is known simply as Old US 12 and, going east, it changes to Jackson Avenue once it crosses Wagner Avenue, eventually becoming Huron Street in downtown Ann Arbor and then Washtenaw Avenue as it stretches east to Ypsilanti. But that one stretch – the few miles between Ann Arbor and Chelsea which, though long ago paved, is still rural between the two towns; lush with old trees on either side that often block older farms, or remnants of where they once thrived.
It is the Jackson Road I know best and it’s the route my grandparents, Ted and Laura, more than a century ago, would have taken often as they made their way between the towns.
My Grandfather was born in 1887 on a one-hundred-forty-acre farm just a few miles south of Chelsea. He lived a century and a year. The third of eight children, he’d be the first of his siblings to leave the farm, graduate high school and, eventually, become manager of Detroit Edison’s Ann Arbor office, a role he held until his retirement.
He’d known Laura most of his life and once she completed her training as a nurse they married on July 18, 1917. Their first home was in Ann Arbor, followed by a year in Detroit, and then back, closer to their roots, in the home they built in Ypsilanti, at 1023 Washtenaw. It was 1923.
In an oral interview he gave on his one-hundredth birthday, when asked what drew him to his wife, Grandpa shared that Laura was good company. They understood each other.
Together, they shared a life of equally profound love and loss. Laura passed in 1943, leaving my grandfather a widower and his three, nearly grown children, without a mother for most of their lives. But there were four children from their union; Patricia, forever the oldest, forever a child, was born in 1921 and died less than two years later, from diphtheria, in April 1923.
I never asked Grandpa too much about Patty because I didn’t want him to be sad; though I knew he carried her close throughout his life. The only photo I ever saw displayed on his bureau was of her – in his bedroom in the home he built with Laura, when he lived in Ohio with us, and in his final home, back in Ypsilanti. It sat on his dresser along with a comb, a brush and his black bead rosary.
In that same interview Grandpa talked of how difficult Patty’s death had been. They missed her terribly, and I still hear his voice, rising just a pitch, as he recalled how they had such plans for her. They’d bought books to educate her and had hopes for travel.
Her death was what prompted Laura to return to practice nursing, eventually developing the model for what became the first public health program throughout Washtenaw County. I don’t know if the children she nursed and the women and men she educated had any idea where the seed of her kindness was born. But I know, so I lift her up whenever I can.
As a child, Patty’s loss made me sad to think about; as a parent, it is unimaginable.
~ ~ ~
We don’t live far from Ann Arbor and, no matter how many towns and states I’ve lived in, Ypsilanti will always be where I’m from. And so, on a brisk March morning, just a few months ago, when spring was finally getting the upper hand over winter’s last days, we took a drive to Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti for a few hours of antiquing and lunch. Though my grandfather passed almost forty years ago, I still find myself, when wandering through antique stalls and shops in the area, looking for something that might have been in his home, though much heirloom pieces of furniture were parsed out to my sisters and me. The china cabinet that stood in his dining room for decades is now in my home, laden not with fragile dishes or delicate crystal but full, just the same, with photos of my grandparents, my parents, one of Patty, on the back of which, long ago, was written, An angel singing.
There are a few books and journals, as well, and the small brass perpetual desk calendar that was my grandfather’s, with dials to set the month, date and day. I used to play with it as a child. It sat on the secretary desk in the corner of his dining room and had an array of cubby holes and drawers for a sundry of items – paper clips, small notepads, stamps. His typewriter sat in the middle of the desk and I imagined being grown up, in an office, writing something on the typewriter that was important and interesting enough that others wanted to read.
When I first acquired the calendar I set it to the date of my grandfather’s passing because, at the time, it seemed time stood still. But time never stops, and I know now that, over time, the unimaginable becomes less sharp and painful until it dulls and, finally, almost dissolves, settling into the rest of our history.
A few years after his death, I moved the dials to September 8, 1990. The day I married Tim. Now, when I’m dusting or straightening the shelves, or happen to be passing by, I turn it to the current date and day.
But on that day, this past March, while Spring pushed its way forward, I found myself frozen in place, on the third-floor loft of an old barn at our favorite antique stop. Once a thriving farm, it went from growing and harvesting crops to buying and selling antiques more than a century ago. A sprawling, low-lying building that has been added to over time houses rare case goods and a trove of other pieces – from clocks to cutlery, copper pots and pans, rare books. A few paintings from Europe are on the walls, but most of the art is housed in the old barn. There, the artists on display have two common traits: they are all from Michigan, and they are all deceased.
The owner, a third-generation descendant of the early farmers, offered to show us the gallery as we walked back from the finishing shop several yards from the main building. A one (dead) man art show was being staged and opening in April. Would we like to see it?
Without hesitation I answered yes.
We wound our way from the main floor, to the second and then, what was once a hay loft, to the third floor where the largest gallery has been established. The artist was Leon Makielski and the collection, titled A Midwest Perspective, ranged from a few portraits to mostly landscapes; some set in Indiana, a few in Illinois that I’ll learn were done during the years he studied at the Chicago Art Institute. He’d studied in Paris, too, primarily the Impressionists. And as my eyes began to take in the paintings, I saw a fusion of two things I love the most: the Midwest and the beauty of those artists who, a few hundred years ago, blurred and blended the lines to capture a place and moment, stirring all the senses – the warmth of the sun, the smell of cut grass, the taste of the air after a rain, the sound of the wind through fields of hay. The colors.
While the first few pieces I study, including the dome of Notre Dame University in South Bend make me think of a church in France, it becomes clear that the majority of his work are places in Ann Arbor, the town Makielski called home most of his life, where he taught painting at the University of Michigan and where he bought a farm to raise his family, using the barn for his studio.
My eyes take in the familiar locations rendered in oils and acrylics: the Cross Street bridge over the Huron River in Ypsilanti, fields of wheat and bales of hay that, I imagine, could have been my grandfather’s farm. I begin to turn as I take them all in, these familiar places that not only touch my heart but bear witness to my family’s past. And that’s when I see it, the small painting in the opposite corner of the room that seems to have sunlight streaming through it. A summer morning on a rural stretch of road with a lone Model T making its way from the view of those looking on; farms and small buildings dotting the land. It is headed west.
I can’t move, because I know. Somehow, I know. They are in that car, together. Laura and Ted. Grandpa. My grandmother, who didn’t live to hear that name from the lips of her eleven grandchildren, but whose life influenced and shaped so many of us.
The owner notices my expression and looks to the far wall, in the direction of the painting. Isn’t that a beauty, he says.
My words rush out. I tell him about my grandparents, Grandpa’s farm in Chelsea, my grandmother establishing public health in rural Washtenaw County — my grandfather having purchased a car for her travels so no one who needed her care would be out of reach. I share about my Aunt Patty; how short her life, how impactful it was.
We are both silent for a few moments and then he carefully lifts the painting from its hook to see the title and date on the back. In the artist’s own hand, it simply reads: Jackson Road 1923.
~ ~ ~
I think of my grandparents often these days. The love they gave to Patty, and each other, when they surely knew all that could be done had been and, in the end, it would not be enough.
What strength it would have taken to rise again, the morning after the twenty-sixth of April 1923 and put one foot in front of the other. To put each other before themselves. To have such faith to say another prayer, after their most fervent supplication had gone unanswered.
The acceptance. The courage. The love it took to continue to get in that car in Ypsilanti and head west on Washtenaw Avenue, then onto Jackson Road to share with their family in Chelsea that, by the following May, a second child, a son, would arrive. He would live to be ninety-six, outliving his two younger siblings by decades. The youngest, a second daughter, would grow into a sophisticated woman and remain close to her father in all ways. She would become a teacher, travel through Europe with a friend from college, and later with her husband, after their seven children were educated, grown and on their own; far flung from their small Midwest hometown of Ypsilanti.
As their youngest I watched and learned from them, remembering and taking the lessons that mattered most.
Now our children are grown with families of their own. I know they have taken some of the best we gave and have become who and what they were meant to be.
And so, reluctantly, but knowing we must, we have finally let them go.
They are, at last, my kites without strings.
~ ~ ~
Time is precious for all things, but unlike my grandfather’s perpetual calendar, I cannot choose one date and make it last.
And so, we move forward. And, despite our uncertainties about this world in so much flux and our anxious thoughts about who and what we leave behind, we draw on our courage, planted and nurtured so long ago.
I know now that we’ll continue to get in the car and drive; mostly north and, at times, a jog to the east, just past Ypsilanti, when the road dissolves the way it does into that serpentine interstate known simply as Ninety-four.
We’ll exit at Merriman Road that takes us to Metro Airport where we’ll check-in hours early for our flight. We’ll accept the champagne after takeoff, doze a bit and, by morning, we’ll be in Paris. During our travels we’ll attend Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral, magnificently restored now. It is as lustrous as imagined and as sacred as we have always known. We’ll light a candle for spoken and unspoken hopes and prayers, understanding more as each year passes that prayers are answered not always in the way we imagined, but time always reveals the mystery of faith if we pause long enough to see it.
We’ll travel to Chantilly and Giverny and walk through the gardens, stopping for a while to take in the sinuous vines of amethyst-hued wisteria that hang dense and lush across that emerald green bridge. We’ll visit museums and cafes and give the beggar outside the Church of Madeleine twenty euros, in hopes that it will go to a good and nourishing meal that evening because, long ago, we understood that God really could be any one of us. And any one of us could as easily be the beggar. Who are we to know or judge?
In the end, all we have is our faith. Our faith that gives us courage. Courage, our dreams.
Who taught us that? Our parents, our families, our experiences. Our grandparents. My grandparents; specifically the one I knew and loved so deeply and the one I know only from memories and stories of others who, in 1923, twenty-two years before the armistice of 1945, twenty years before she passed, sixty-five years before his death, but just three months after Patty’s, found the courage to shoulder their grief and move ahead with the belief that this life – these few, precious moments we are given, are to be lived.
~ ~ ~
As evening settles in on Paris on this Eighth of May, while those around me dance, remember and celebrate so many, who gave so much, so there could be nights such as this – full of wine and song and memory, so that we could be born and grow, learn and teach, nurture and travel, weep, laugh, work and rest, I celebrate Ted and Laura most of all.
I cherish my journey; the whole of it that began so long ago, by ancestors who I’ve known, and those I’ve only known of. We inherit the color of their eyes, their smiles. Their names. But the real treasures of our inheritance go much deeper, and we are richer for them.
The woman with the dark, swept hair passes by.
I sip my wine and picture the painting that hangs now just above my writing desk. And I silently thank my grandparents for having the faith and courage it took to get into that automobile and head west, then east — again and again — on Jackson Road in 1923.