Opa’s Raincoat
“Gramma, whatcha doing?”
I looked down at her intensely curious eyes. Emily was not four. She was proudly four-and-a-half as she would loudly proclaim if you happened to forget. She and her mother, my Elizabeth, had just moved into my guestroom.
I patted the sofa cushion next to me and little Emily hopped up and snuggled in close. I turned my iPad screen toward her and said, “I’m looking at every picture I have of you, and of your Mom and Dad, and of your Grampa and me.”
Emily rolled her head back in disbelief. “That’s a ton of pictures! Like a bazillion of ‘em!”
“Yes, it is! And I don’t want to miss a single one!”
“But why are you wearing that old coat in the house?”
“This coat?” I lifted the lapels as if to examine it closely. “Did you know this coat once belonged to my grandfather? After that it belonged to my grandmother. Yes, your grandmother once had a grandmother, too! Well, then it belonged to my mother, and now it belongs to me. I will soon give it to your mother, and I suppose one day she will give it to you. This is a very special coat! Let me tell you a story. This is the story of the last time I saw my grandmother’s house and the first time I saw this old coat.
I didn’t want to be there, but Mama made me. She said at twelve years old I was almost a woman, and so I was old enough even if I didn’t want to. She said, “You’ll be glad you did if you do and sorry you didn’t if you don’t.” Mama was always saying things like that.
Mama was right. The first thing that made me glad was the smell, but it also nearly broke my heart. How I loved that smell! I loved it so much that I burst into tears as soon as I walked through the door. You see, my Oma was gone. I knew I would never see her again, and I had thought I would never smell her house again. I breathed it in as deeply as I could and it smelled wonderful, but oh, how it hurt.
Mama and Miss Esther pretended not to notice, giving me a private moment to feel my love for Oma and also to feel how much it hurt that she was gone. Esther had been Oma’s nurse five days a week for almost a year. She had become like family and was there to help Mama pack up Oma’s personal things before they shut the curtains and closed up the house. They had some crates and big cloth sacks, and even a couple of steamer trunks as big as I was. They left those in the front hall while they walked around and talked. When I was ready, I wiped away my tears and joined them.
After that rush of feelings when I first walked in, I did pretty well. I bagged up the quilting projects that she hadn’t finished and all her yards and bits of fabric. Then I found a couple of scrapbooks with old black and white photos, postcards, and ticket stubs pasted on the pages. I put those in a crate to take home and then moved on. There was a bookshelf lined with dusty old books that looked really boring and those, I decided, we would leave behind. There was also a shelf lined with sketchbooks, plus one more just like all the rest but on the little table by her chair. That one had a few shaky sketches and some scribbled notes, but it was mostly empty. The others were full from cover to cover, and they dated back at least forty years. I opened one of the older volumes and studied it page by page. I had no idea what a talented artist my Oma had been! Beautiful pen and ink sketches of flowers and fruit bowls and sleeping cats. I looked at another and it was filled with city scenes and sidewalk cafes that might have been New York City, or maybe even Paris.
I found one that had dozens of sketches of a handsome young man’s face that I guessed was my Opa Dieter. That would be your great-great grandfather! I took it into the other room to show Mama. She and Miss Esther were emptying out a closet. That’s when I saw Mama holding up a long, dark coat, an old-fashioned man’s overcoat. This coat.
“Father’s raincoat!” said my Mama. “I always thought he looked so dashing when he wore this. Like Humphrey Bogart!” She paused and sighed. “The last time I saw it, Mother was wearing it at his funeral. It was a graveside service, and it was raining, of course. We were all huddled under umbrellas, but she stood alone in the rain with this old coat pulled over her head.”
“Maybe you didn’t know,” said Esther, “but she wore that old thing in the house a lot, especially lately when she was looking through her old photo albums. She called it her paincoat because it kept off the pain like a raincoat keeps off the rain.”
I watched as Mama held it up to her nose and then buried her face in it. In a muffled voice she said, “I can still smell his old pipe, and I smell her lavender, too.” When she lowered the coat, her tears were flowing. She saw me standing there holding Oma’s sketchbook and she reached out to me, saying, “Come here and let’s see what you’ve found.”
We plopped down on Oma’s loveseat and Mama threw Opa Dieter’s coat over both our heads just like we were in a rainstorm. “There!” she said. “Now we can remember your Oma with all our hearts, and it won’t hurt so bad that she’s gone.”
“But if it doesn’t hurt, then why are you crying so much?” I said.
“Oh, my baby girl, these aren’t sad tears. They’re just love leaking out of my eyes.”
She was always saying things like that.
“Gramma,” said Emily with a serious face, “are you going to be gone someday?”
“Yes, my baby girl. Someday soon I’m afraid.”
“I think it will hurt when you’re gone.”
“Well, then,” I said, pulling the old coat over both of our heads, “it’s a good thing we have Opa’s coat.”
Just then, Elizabeth walked into the room and she understood what was happening with just a glance. “Is there room for three under that old coat?”
She sat next to me, taking Emily on her lap and snuggling in close as I pulled the coat over our heads. She looked at me and said, “Mom, you’ve got love leaking out of your eyes.”
Emily looked up and said, “Mommy! You’ve got love leaking out of your eyes, too!”
They were always saying things like that.
