The Turtle House by Churchill Amanda

Author:Churchill, Amanda [Churchill, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9780063290518
Amazon: 0063290510
Barnesnoble: 0063290510
Goodreads: 158649877
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2024-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Dennis, Texas

March 30, 1999

Waking up in Autumn Leaves is like waking up in a business-class hotel. There’s the sound of trays and the soft-soled assistants delivering medicines; there’s a whir of noises that I can only imagine are showers and toilets, coffee makers with automatic timers, and somewhere, the gentle ding and rumble of the elevator.

The sun is coming through the curtains because we forgot to close the blackout portion last night. My grandmother’s glasses are on her stomach, moving up and down with each snore, and we are wearing what we wore yesterday. We have gone through an entire package of sandwich cookies, and I feel the tiny crumbs on the bedspread as I sit up. All around us is graph paper. I made a late run to the office supply store, getting there right before they closed for the night and before the sky opened up, dumping water troughs of rain, and bought whatever I felt was needed for the project at hand.

It was what she had wanted all along, but had never said it in the way we both understood. A house. Just for her retirement. But built to her specifications.

Grandminnie sits up with a groan and puts on her glasses. She looks at me blankly, brushes crumbs off my chest, and mutters that we are both slobs. But then she smiles, remembering our work, our plans from the night before.

On a twenty-four-inch-by-thirty-six-inch piece of graph paper is the turtle house, as it is in my grandmother’s memory and the one blurry photo she has. She paced out how big the main rooms were last night. We had to go out into the long hallway at midnight, and she closed her eyes and walked from the genkan to the back wall. How many feet wide? How tall were the ceilings? We guessed, then did math. Each graph paper square is a foot, each foot a part of the past. She helped me sketch the front from her memory, the sides, the back of the house that faced the river. She dictated as I drew the grounds, the river below, the road leading to the bamboo forest. Pages and pages of paper are all over Grandminnie’s studio apartment.

Then, at two in the morning, with pea-sized hail hitting the balconette window, we shrank the turtle house. One story became two, the rooms smaller. Again, we paced and, using the proportion method, we made it the right size for one woman, one cat, and an occasional overnight guest. We placed it on Cope land, near the creek, using our own memory-based aerial map.

Off and on, all night, I recorded her memories of the house, of the colors of the tiles and the thickness of the tatami. The types of flowers in the garden and the types of stones that paved the walkway. We used up two mini-cassettes last night. I label them with the date, and I store them in a purple Crown Royal velvet bag in my backpack, all in order from day to day, story to story.

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