Sunlight Through Dusty Windows by Dorcas Smucker

Author:Dorcas Smucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Good Books
Published: 2017-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Heritage and Hope

Connecting Generations

“Do you want to call home and see how things are going?” I ask my daughter Amy.

“Sure,” she says, and reaches for the phone, then pauses. “Could someone show me how to use this?”

I teach her how to use a rotary dial, and she makes the call. The two of us are at my parents’ home in Minnesota for a week’s visit. Amy is 14 and almost inseparable from her cousin Janet, who is 15 and lives next door. My parents are in their 80s, and I feel like I am the uncertain link between two generations, as though I am trying to connect a rotary-dial phone and the Internet.

“Who is Tommy Hilfiger?” my mother asks the girls, who are into brand names.

Dad adds, “Is he your boyfriend?”

Amy and Janet double over, laughing, then Janet gives him a short, shouted lesson in fashion, hoisting up her foot to show him the Hilfiger logo on her sock. Dad looks mystified, either because he can’t hear or can’t comprehend, or both.

“Come on, we need to see Dad’s animals,” I tell Amy one afternoon, and we head to the barn.

“Ewwww, that smell!” she shrieks when I open the door. I am dumbfounded. Complaining about a barn smell is like fussing because garden dirt is such an ugly brown.

Amy and Janet are confident and talkative, strong in their opinions and finding lots to laugh about. I wonder what Dad thinks. He always valued decorum and country life, saving his harshest criticism for the times my sister and I acted, as he put it, like silly town girls. If Amy and Janet’s behavior irritates him, he doesn’t let on, but the girls freely let us all know that the dentist-drill squeal from Dad’s hearing aids drives them crazy.

For a while, I feel like I am the only link between these disparate generations, constantly trying to explain them to each other. But as the week goes on, I find to my relief that there are many connections between these girls and their grandparents that go far beyond my groping attempts to find common ground between them.

Amy might turn up her nose at the barn smell, but we are all intrigued by the small flock of nervous goats and calm, heavily wooled sheep that wanders the property at will. When Mom steps outside the back door with a bucket of old vegetables from the grocery store, the sheep all come running, and Amy takes photographs from the window as Mom tosses bunches of broccoli at her flock.

Later, one of the sheep finds a five-gallon bucket out by the barn and somehow gets the bucket over its head and can’t get it off. Dad and I circle in slowly over the frozen grass as the sheep baas pathetically inside the bucket. Then we perform a dramatic rescue while Mom and the girls cheer us on from the dining-room window.

In addition, we are all bookworms. No matter where we sit down in my parents’ house, there’s a stack of reading material within reach.

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