The story below is an excerpt from our May/June 2017 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, log in to read our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app. Thank you!
Cece Bell is an author and illustrator of books for children. She lives in an old church in Montgomery County, Virginia, and she works right next door in a newish barn. Her graphic novel memoir, “El Deafo”, which chronicles her childhood experiences with hearing loss, received a Newbery Honor and an Eisner Award in 2015. She has also created many picture books, and often collaborates with her husband, the author Tom Angleberger.
The first five years of my life, in the early ‘70s, I lived in Richmond, Virginia. One of my earliest memories began its shape there, in the muggy twilight of an early summer evening. I was already wearing my pajamas when I joined my older brother and older sister in the back of the cavernous white Volvo—we were leaving the big city to visit our grandmother. I stretched out and fell asleep with my head on my sister’s lap, or more specifically, on the pillow that my sister was holding in her lap, the satiny pillow with the psychedelic pink and brown flowers that my mom would sit on to help her see better when she drove.
Granny Bell lived in the mountains across the state, and across the street from the train tracks, in a sweet little house on Depot Street a few doors up from the Cambria train station. It took a long time to get there. I woke up when my father lifted me out of the car. The late night air was cool, sharp even, especially for summer, especially after Richmond, especially after a long car ride that was stuffy even with the windows down the whole way.
The air smelled like cut grass, maybe. Like cherries from the cherry tree in Granny Bell’s backyard, some ready to be picked off the branches, and some just barely beginning to rot on the ground. The air felt cooler the farther away it got from the ground that had been storing up heat all day, which was a surprise—doesn’t warm air rise and cool air sink? Dad carried me to Granny Bell’s bedroom and tucked me into one of her twin beds, and I nestled under the white chenille bedspread, waiting for Granny Bell to join me later, in her own bed right next to mine.
When I replay this memory in my head, as I always do in summer, I feel the soft knobby bumps of the chenille under my fingers; I see the dim lamp, kept on for me, illuminating the wallpaper, making the white daisies glow on their pale blue background; I taste the Tang that Granny Bell mixed for me and placed on the bedside table; I smell the slightly cloying perfume of Granny Bell’s ancient rose lotion, hanging in the pockets of the room that the air outside the open window couldn’t reach—a product I am sure she never used, as Granny Bell herself smelled like Dove soap and green beans. I like to think that I hadn’t lost my hearing yet, that I could hear the trains passing by in the night, that I could hear the adults catching up, laughing just outside the bedroom door. If I was four when this memory happened, then yes. If I was five, then no. I’ve never been sure. Memory does play its tricks.
Years later, I moved into my own house, also in the mountains of Montgomery County, also across the street from the train tracks, and also surrounded, in the summers, with that same cool mountain air that envelops me in my grandmother’s warm embrace, and prompts a real craving for a glass of Tang.