Jamie (Internet remix) • I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother...

I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother lately. Part of that is probably because each year for Groundhog Day she would use a butter knife to draw a groundhog in the peanut butter of our sandwiches for school. Part of it is the fact I just realized she died 15 years ago, on Dec. 4, 1996. And part of it is that today is 10 years since the house she lived in when I was growing up burnt down.

After she fell, broke her hip, and came to live with us in 1990, one of my uncles moved into the house. The house I grew up in is the last in a row of four houses, and my uncles and aunts lived in the other three.

I was living at home when the fire happened, and I was home from work early. I had grand designs on writing all about the fire for today, but it would have taken weeks, and a narrative of a fire and its aftermath doesn’t really capture what happened.

It’s hard to watch the house where some of your earliest memories happened burn. To see the huge plate window where your grandmother taught you to identify birds blackened with soot. To have the linoleum floor that supported the kitchen table where you learned to love to drink coffee heat up, sag and collapse. To watch the ivy that had been growing along the front of the house since long before you were born burn off and never return.

The weeks after the fire were spent cleaning out debris, burying the dozen stray cats my aunt had taken in, rolling out the project cars my uncle kept in the garage, even though everyone knew he was never going to work on them, putting the things that escaped the flames but were saturated with the woody, sharp smell of smoke into plastic bins so they could be cleaned.

It’s a brick house, so it’s still standing. It took most of two years, but my uncle and aunt moved back in. Now it’s their house. And though I’ve been inside dozens of times since the fire, I can’t tell you what the inside of the house looks like. I can’t shake the memories of the hardwood floors, the white metal beds my brother and I slept in, the big console TV and bigger console record player. When I visit, I half expect to sit at a table that’s been stopped from wobbling only by a piece of cardboard folded up and wedged under a leg, and sitting on high-backed green vinyl chairs that your legs would stick to in the summer. I think I might catch a glimpse of elementary-school-aged me sitting at that table, watching “Reading Rainbow” on a television sitting atop an old foot-powered Singer sewing machine, or my grandmother, still on her own in her 80s, using the yellow push-powered vacuum to clean the area rug in the dining room. Maybe I hope to see the blue glass vase that sat on top of the perpetually out-of-tune piano—the vase that my mother told me dated back to before the Civil War when a pillow fight with my brother nearly knocked it to the floor.

But though I’m welcome whenever I want to come over, the house where my grandmother lived is gone now, just as she is.