The winter sun casts a cold, blue light over my grandmother’s morning walk with me. Although her hair is almost completely white, she steps with a sure, reliable vitality that quells my prattling questions about where we’re going today.  I follow her down a hill, no sound in the air besides our breathing and the gravel crunching under our feet, the first row of pines rising ever taller over her head. Suburbia melts away. I marvel at the illusion of my dignified grandmother shrinking. I didn’t know it then, but I would one day grow to be taller than her.

As we break the tree line, the dripping sound of the forest joins the chorus of the morning, and we hear the hints of rushing water somewhere not too far away. It has just rained, and the sweet smell of petrichor envelops me. Even though I am only five, this evergreen entrance makes me feel like I understand why my grandmother’s porch windows are a spectacle of world peace, anti-fracking, and Curious George stickers. I am responsible for the earnest monkeys, but the rest of the display comes from her wish for her grandchildren to experience the same natural world that she did. And so, we tramp through the forest on a rainy Saturday. She takes my hand in hers as we traverse a patch of mud, and her thin lips part as she smiles down at me.

We go on these walks when I come to visit her almost every week. I am still small, so she watches me to help my parents, who are busy with my two younger siblings. Celeste bears witness to tears, spills, and toilets reached too late. But what she puts up with on the days of our walks is much less than what she used to when I was younger. A few days after I was born, she packed her whole life into her little green car and drove to Oregon from the Air Force base in Phoenix where she worked as an optics scientist. From then until I began elementary school, she raised me almost as much as my own parents did. Grandma Celeste became the keeper of scores of my most illuminated memories.

Many of my youngest days were spent just the two of us in her little house on the deer run. With her, I learned to walk, talk, read, and play. I spent numerous hours in the nook behind the piano with the old stuffed bear from my father’s childhood and the funny blue-footed booby toy gifted to her by other conservationists. We took the TriMet line to the fabric store, where it seemed like she knew everybody. Always a woman of knowledge, she read Scientific American next to me as I pondered over German picture books or The Complete Tales of Winnie the Pooh. She listened to National Public Radio while she made me breakfast (gluten-free toast) and graciously switched the program to a classical adaptation of Peter and the Wolf when I came to the table. My grandmother spent her life thinking and learning, and she wanted to teach me to do the same.

But now my days are filled by kindergarten, and I don’t see her as much. So she starts taking me on her long walks through the trees, where we are mostly silent as we take great breaths of the damp aroma and explore our own minds. When we do speak, it is usually because I like to ask her silly questions about what games she played when she was a little girl, or if she misses her mother. But sometimes, like today, my grandmother speaks about her life to guide my own.

As she holds my small hand between the bones of her fingers, she shares bits of herself and the women who raised her. Did I know that during the mid-nineteenth century, her grandmother helped her grandfather found the first women’s hospital in their dusty Texas town? Did I know that my great-grandmother Faye stuck overzealous young men with her hat pins at the movies? My grandmother tells these stories thoughtfully, but the delicate creases around her eyes embrace as she savors the accompanying pictures that only she can conjure in her mind. We continue following the twists and turns of the dirt path among the firs, and she sifts through years of memories to bring me the stories I love best, the ones about her own life.

Grandma Celeste was born a McCollough, a name that really comes from an Irish folktale, but one that I use to mean the courage, willfulness, accomplishment, and stubbornness that defined my ancestors, especially my grandmother. She grew up in the Great Depression, when her father taught her how to neatly cut out parts of the newspaper that they wanted to save – coupons, adverts, articles that he thought might one day be significant remembrances of history, all with straight, even edges. He also wanted her to be a concert pianist, so she practiced every day in her girlhood. Even decades later, her fingers still flow like water over the keys when she runs through scales and teaches me to find middle C and poke out simple nursery rhyme tunes. But she did not become a performer. She wanted to be a discoverer.

Instead of obeying her father, my grandmother went to college and then got a doctorate in psychology. She became a distinguished research scientist who published papers, authored textbooks, and became the first woman appointed to a full-time teaching position in the psychology department at Oberlin College. Her path was not easy as a woman in STEM in the 1960s. She swam upstream, refusing ludicrous promises and hotel room interviews from male superiors and waiting until forty-five to have my father. She faced such challenges, traps, and muttered judgements because she loved her career and was motivated to pave her own way. You can do that, too, she says. Like herself and the women who came before me, I can break ground, or say no, or do something that women don’t usually do. And you can do better, she dreams aloud, looking down at my cheeks, still round like a baby’s and innocently red from the morning chill. The world is different, and you have McCollough in you.

We come to the crest of a hill and look down upon a rare clearing in the woods. The light shines softly through the leaves, illuminating the forest’s tranquility in crisp technicolor. A dozen long-legged does lift their heads and blink at us before carrying on with the grass. My grandmother stops walking to watch them. She stands like the scene below us deserves respect, and she contemplates the deer as if she possesses some deeper understanding of the moment’s weight. Underneath her gentle gaze lies a vast wisdom drawn from every decision in her life that required her to recognize, in some way, that she and her dreams were worth the struggle. Even at my young age, I can feel that strength pass over me like the soft brush of her hands, and I feel at home.

I look up at her cool blue eyes and admire her, this woman who seems to know everything and has lived so much life on her own terms, who pauses time to wonder at this small piece of the world. I learn from this moment, and many others, some tenacious will to understand how to move through the world like her, and as the women who came before us. They all feel so alive in my grandmother, rustling the pinecones overhead and stirring up the smell of the woods. Grandma Celeste takes one last look at the deer before turning to me. I take in her straight nose and her gentle cheekbones that have not yet grown so gaunt as to show her age. Shall we go home, Kate?

*          *          *

            The January wind howls about my dormitory window and beats the barren branches of the tree outside. I look up from my desk and study the glassy river across the street, frozen over for the first time since I arrived at college. The New England day outside looks like my favorite kind, cold and wintry such that the sunlight has a frigid tint of blue. But I can’t go out; there is too much to be done. Besides, there are no trees in the city.

A car blares its horn on the street below, and I sigh and close my laptop. I have been stuck on one paragraph for an hour, twisting the architecture of organic chemistry into flat sentences on a screen. If I’ll only be listed as the sixteenth collaborator, other things must take priority. Cover letters for the summer. A hem to mend in my lab slacks. Flights for spring break. Registration for the MCAT. I roll my eyes at the thought of this item on my to-do list. Do I even want to become a doctor? Yes, everyone says. Yes, I have always said, shrinking away from the bigger question. What will I do in this lifetime? What should I do, what do I want to do, and how to put those two things together in some reasonable way that will make what it costs to get there worth it? These questions must be answered so I can allot the correct amounts of time into the correct extracurriculars so I can get into the best version of whatever comes next. These questions must be answered quickly. 

I push my chair back from the desk and stand up. Sixteenth author on a research paper isn’t much of an argument for becoming a chemist, but at least it is concrete. Until the paper is published, all I have is the random florescence of chemical intuition that unfurled last spring in Organic I. Since then, I’ve followed it to the research I’m writing up now, but some abstract affinity to the behavior of atoms and bonds isn’t enough for me to be sure that this is my purpose.

I peer through the window at the invisible gusts that make me pity the afternoon’s sidewalk joggers. It’s time for lunch (toast again), and I think about the straight, well-kept road to medical school as I drift to the shelf for the bread. I could just abandon it, even though I’ve presumed doctoring would be my destiny since childhood. I could give up the streamlined, stable life that would come with the stethoscope and the white coat. But then I would be wandering in the tangled thicket of research and academia, forced to make my own way. I pause for a moment and wonder what Grandma would say. I wish I had asked her how she chose her life. Snow begins to fall outside. It is January, one year since she died, but almost three years since all those stories began to leave her.

I put butter on the limp bread so it can melt in the toaster. The people next door turn on classical music, and it flows through the brick wall into my space. I contemplate myself in the embrace of the soft sounds and the sweet aroma of warm wheat. Where do I belong? Should I be a chemist or a doctor? I don’t know if I can accept the grueling, methodical way through medical school. But at least there are streetlights, manicured lawns, and well-trodden paths to an agreeable, useful  life. My alternative is directionless, an overwhelming timberland of chemistry so dense that I don’t know how to see more than just a few steps ahead. And that feels more terrifying.

I picture my grandmother when I feel lost like this. I see her straight nose and cool blue eyes under the grey wave of her pinned up hair. I wish she could guide me to a break in the trees, a clearing of deer, and tell me if she still thinks I can do it. I wish I could once more take her hand and feel the strength of our familial courage. I know I have McCollough in me, and I think of that whenever I feel myself turning…the forest lingers in my mind. Will I go? Will I one day grow to be taller than her?

 

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