Mama

Mama and grandpa, a long time ago. They took the picture when I was still a baby

I used to call her mama. That's what she was to me. Mama. My memories of my grandmother seem blurry to me now. But I remember the feeling of her around the old house, cooking, washing and yelling at me to get down from the top of one of the quince tree near the gate, where I used to hang out when I was a blond blue eyed 5 year old brat.

I have never seen mama without a scarf. I only remember the few strands of hair making way from under her colored scarf which became greyer and greyer and greyer. She was small, former stunning brunette. I know that from the old pictures grandpa still has stashed in some corner in the old house I haven't stepped foot in for so long. 10 years fly fast when you want to keep moving in a huge dirty city. I used to play with those pictures when I was 4 or 5. Mama was beautiful when she was young and I wished she had been a lady from the colored books I had hidden under my bed. But mama wasn't a lady. Not that classic beauty of the 1930s you see in the old black and white movies. Her father, my great grandfather, was a very tough man. His two girls, mama and her little sister, only went to school until they finished the fourth grade. Then he needed them to take care of the garden and the animals. It was the 1930s in a small, very small town in eastern Romania, frozen in time. That town seems always frozen in time, although it changes. You can see the changes every time you get there, but you're still fooled, still get the feeling that everything had stopped moving, or that time somehow moves on a different pattern, a pattern yet undiscovered, stuck somewhere between the past, present and your feelings.

My mama married my grandpa. I don't remember much of their love story. My mind links her more to myself than to other people. I have this huge inclination of jealousy when it comes to my mama, a jealousy I've never felt regarding my mother. Mama was always mine. I had slept with her ever since I was a baby, I had heard her voice constantly in my ear, singing me to sleep, telling me stories to sleep, chasing away the two scary Muppets, Statler and Waldorf, that used to creep me out in my nightmares. Mama used to sit me on the porch in front of the house in summer the summer afternoon when grandpa wasn't retired yet and still went to work and she used to tell me stories. Very strange stories I haven't heard from anybody else. I don't know if she made them up on the spot, I don't think so. She told them to me again and again. I don't know who could have told her those stories, but they fascinated me. I remember one in particular, that always made me cry and made me wonder. The story of a common girl, an orphan girl who was hungry and went into a garden and ate some grapes. The garden belonged to a stone hearted prince who ordered his guards to cut the girl's hands for stealing. And they did. And she wandered without hands in the garden and she met Mother Mary one day. And she gave her her hands back, made her beautiful and she turned the prince's heart in to a kind one and when he saw that girl wandering in his gardens, he fell in love with her and they got married.

I never had the the classic grandmother, the grey-haired small lady with a warm smiling face knitting in a comfortable armchair near the fireplace. When I was a child I used to think that's where all children put their grandmothers and I used to be very sad that mine was not from that fairytale place. But I had mama. I didn't want to see her when she died. I was 17 and felt like a stranger to her. When my mother came back one morning and woke me up to tell me mama was gone I didn't even blink. I had to clean the house. I cleaned all 4 rooms. I had never cleaned the house before. I cried for the first time after a few months. I was doing some homework. And suddenly I missed her. I realized she wasn't around anymore. And I clicked. And it was painful.