Cloud Hill By Laura J. Oliver

A friend of mine was wondering aloud the other day whether her kids would ever appreciate all she was doing for them, and I assured her they would. “Absolutely, without a doubt!” I proclaimed, adding, “When you’re dead.” I based this on my own experience but it’s not a prediction about my own legacy. It’s that I’ve come to appreciate a relative now whom I did not love while she was alive.

My paternal grandmother was perfectly nice to me, yet I didn’t like her. I may have been channeling my mother’s disapproval of the way my grandmother wielded money for influence. (There is a reason my father christened his new cabin cruiser, “Windfall…”). So, perhaps I was my mother’s unwitting proxy, something I wouldn’t wish on any grandmother. Even one who called me “Sugar Girl” in a high, quavering voice and inexplicably smacked her lips. A lot.

My grandmother was not big on just sitting around. Case in point—in her late 70’s she and her older sister got summer jobs as chambermaids at a resort in Watch Hill, Rhode Island just for something to do. But by the time she was 85, my widowed grandmother was a resident of an assisted living facility in Florida (isn’t everyone?), and I could tell she was bored at Mease Manor. I wanted to help her find a new project, so in a moment of inspiration, I asked her to write down her life story. What was it like to grow up on a farm in the foothills of the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks at the turn of the last century?

Sugar Girl had struck gold.

My grandmother wrote out her entire family history painstakingly, flawlessly, in long hand, in black ink, then wrote out two more volumes so that each of my sisters and I could have our own leather-bound,140-page book detailing her life. She recounted the death of a beloved little brother when she was 9, and he was 7, praise for the Native American doctor who would only come and go from his house through the window, and her grief at the runaway horse accident that killed her father at the age of 44.

She structured each book on a linear timeline, but on the back of each page, she wrote a stand-alone anecdote in red ink. I had to admit that was pretty creative, and I stumbled on an anecdote this morning that made me newly appreciate her. (Long dead! I point out to my friend as evidence that recognition of service is often late in arriving.)

My grandmother had 10 brothers and sisters, all of whom made pets from the farm animals. There were over a hundred chickens to choose from at any one time, along with twenty barn cats, lambs, horses, and pigs. It grieved my great-grandfather every time the kids adopted a pet because he knew the animal was doomed to either die or be sold. He also didn’t want dead animals buried in the yard near the house, so he told the kids that all burials had to be along the fence on Cloud Hill.

There, they staged elaborate services, decorating a considerable number of graves with flowers and broken dishes and singing to the deceased every song and hymn they knew: “Get on Board Little Children,” “Barbara Allen,” “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder.” All pretty standard fare for kids until I read this.

My grandmother had a little gray kitten she loved and carried everywhere. “I gave him a grand time,” she said, until one day a cow stepped on him and he was dispatched to Cloud Hill. She writes that the kids gave that cat a proper burial under a June midwestern sky, when the blackberries were ripe and the corn green in the fields. But she wanted to mark his little grave with something special so she could always find him again, so the hill wouldn’t claim him.

Down by the creek, she found a beautiful rock to use as a marker, but it was too heavy, and she was too little to carry it far.

Wanting to keep this memorial private, she hefted this stone alone and lugged it several yards before she was forced to drop it, but a few days later, she returned to drag it a bit further up the hill. Trip after trip, she recovered the stone from where she’d hidden it in the tall grass, determined to carry out her mission. And here’s where she found me and touched me across time.

It took her all summer to get that rock to the kitten’s grave. She dragged that stone a few feet at a time for three months. I really, really like the girl who did that. I wish I had known her. I am making her acquaintance now.

And I remember that feeling. If you love something as a kid, you don’t love it a little. You love from horizon to heaven. A love as big as the sky.

Because you loved that way then, are there moments you can access a love that size now? Childhood is the place you stored the years you believed in magic, leaped without looking, and took on kids bigger than you to defend someone smaller.

Childhood is where you first knew your omnipotence. If I work hard enough, I can do anything I want to do, be anything I want to be.

I can get this stone to my kitten even if it takes me all summer. Even if it takes me to the end of time.

At 85, writing from her Florida apartment, my grandmother wondered if there was any chance that rock was still at the top of Cloud Hill.

She’s been gone many years; perhaps the stone is gone, too.

But as long as someone else knows the story, it’s there.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.