I leave for Portugal in a week; a place where I will drink too much wine and walk city streets until my legs ache and I will fall into bed exhausted–with sweat beading on my skin and a cool breeze drifting in through the open balcony doors. Everything will feel romantic, like brushing my teeth and grabbing coffee at a cramped café in the morning.
Little treasures from my grandmother’s travels sit on the mantle in the first apartment I can truly call my own. Each time she departed for someplace new a postcard with her careful slant followed, signed “Love, Grandpa and Grandma”. Sometimes there were small gifts, often exchanged in the church parking lot after Sunday school, stowed away carefully in the trunk of her car for safekeeping. There’s a porcelain jester doll from New Orleans, a wooden rabbit, and a fairy with purple wings perched in a line above the fireplace so I can see them always; little trinkets from someone I love mixed together with odds and ends I’ve collected myself.
It feels like too many years ago I dreamt of the day we might travel together to one of the places I’d only seen on the front of her postcards–but the day did not come. I was six years old when the cancer became too much. She is the reason I am enamored with travel and determined to see the world; in the past twenty-four years I’ve thought of her often, though the memories are foggier than I would like. She kept Bomb Pops in the freezer during the summer and my favorite cereal in the pantry–probably Corn Pops or something equally weird for a kid to like. I used to run my small hands over the waxy leaves of the Jade plant sitting in a pot just inside the front door. The cooler in the garage was always filled to the brim with Stewart’s Root Beer and Orange Cream Soda.
I lit a remembrance candle for Grandma Lynn in Westminster Abbey nearly eight years ago, letting my thoughts drift to all of those days we could have had together that I will never see. More often I lament the loss of what would have been; the years she didn’t get to be there to see the person I’ve grown into. At almost 30, I have lived longer without her than I have with her. When the wick caught flame it was the closest I’d felt to her in a long time, gripped by a moment of silence for the two of us.
Travel is one of the few things left which makes me feel connected to a woman I barely knew, but who carried the most immense love for others. When I step off the plane in Lisbon, after we take the train north, I’ll go to a shop and find a postcard to send to my nephew the way my grandmother did for me. I’ll sign off with my love and drop it in a post box; a little piece of paper carrying my love across the sea.
The Rummy Writer 