Grandma held the edge of the bed sheet, snapped it into the air, and billowed it over my sister Coco and me, lying side-by-side in our summer nightgowns on the hide-a-bed in our grandparents’ living room. We giggled and cheered for more.
“Do it again!”
And she did. Another wafting of the fabric and cool landing, and the sheet, smelling like the sky, rested on us. Grandma’s city backyard was small, but not too small for a clothesline where she pinned up sheets on laundry days and captured heaven that way.
Summers lingered in the 1970s, and our road trips from Middle River to visit Grandma and Bapa in Minneapolis did too. After a torturous six hours, the station wagon came to a stop in their driveway in the Seward neighborhood of South Minneapolis. We kids tumbled from the car and bolted past Grandma’s cutting garden—memories of snipping coral bells and ant-dotted peonies whooshed by me—to her back door for hugs. We made a beeline for her pantry to poke around in containers for treats—krumkake and flat breads, lemon bars and date cookies—layered between neat sheets of wax paper.
After sleeping in Grandma’s living room each night, Coco and I shoved the bed back into the sofa in the mornings, and it disappeared under cushions for the day. The room in order again, I would sometimes lift the lid on the nearby ottoman and retrieve the photo album. On its wooden cover was a bird done in lighter wood. It haunted me, that huge book of pictures, but at eight years old, I couldn’t resist it. I didn’t want to make Grandma sad again, so I only looked at it quickly when I had a moment to myself.
Photos of my Aunt Sharon with my mom, the two little sisters frozen in black and white. Dresses with lace collars or everyday frocks with ankle socks and Mary Janes. My mom with her little glasses perched on her nose, and their baby brother. And then the photos of Sharon, age seven, in her casket. Leukemia took her life, and she exhaled her last breath while the bells rang at midnight on New Year’s Eve, heralding the start of 1948. My mother was five.
I studied Sharon’s serene face, her eyes closed to this world, head on a pretty pillow, and I imagined I heard a needle dragging across a spinning record: crackles, a long scratch, and silence. But Grandma was coming. I dropped the cover on the book and returned it to its resting place in the ottoman.
It was summer. We ate watermelon, spit the seeds into the grass, and dutifully brought the rinds to Grandma who pickled them. We walked sidewalks we didn’t have up north. Grandma wore her white Keds, Bapa his penny loafers. We walked to Market Fair for groceries, Darveaux Confectionnaire for candy, and all around the State Fair where I strode through crowds one year, holding a stiff leash with its empty harness for my imaginary dog.
Back at Grandma and Bapa’s house, my siblings and I chattered and sang into the box fans Grandma had running throughout the place on those hot days. There were no air conditioners for us back then, but we enjoyed cooler moments when we shopped at a new store on Lake Street—opened in 1979—called Target.
More than once on our trips to the big city, tornado sirens shrieked, and our excitement mounted. At Bapa’s direction, we kids scampered to the basement for safety. Coolness and the musty smell of dirt greeted us. We passed the potato closet where Grandma tied dried geraniums into bundles and hung them upside-down from nails on the ceiling each winter (to be planted again in the spring) and her rows of canning, and headed into the tiny back room to listen to the radio blurt staticky weather updates while we waited out the storms.
Too soon, the station wagon pulled us away from our summer city fun with Grandma and Bapa and back into our small-town life. And the road home felt even longer.
Grandma and Grandpa (I stopped calling him Bapa at some point in the 1990s, and I don’t know why) are gone, and I’m a grandma now, but I can’t shake off my 1970s self. I pulled up my grandparents’ old address on a real estate site today. I clicked through photos of the rooms. There sat the clawfoot tub that washed away the dust of our summers, there was the pantry built specifically for our snacking pleasures, and there sprawled the porch where I spent an afternoon alone reading in 1979 when I faked I was sick so I didn’t have to go to Great-Aunt Stella’s funeral. Grandma’s Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls kept me company that day as I read, the warm cross breezes ruffling my pages, and the only interruptions were a distant bike bell or two and the clank of the mailbox lid as the mail carrier dropped in his delivery before walking away.
A few days ago, my cousin shared a news article on social media that said, “the biggest heat dome on earth is sitting on top of Minnesota.” A string of days in the nineties makes me long for the languid summer days of my 1970s childhood when time in a hammock in Grandma and Bapa’s South Minneapolis backyard was the most important activity of the day and worth fighting a sibling for. I want the box fans back. I want the seeded watermelon. I want the fresh sheet billowing over me again before I drift off.
But I have today, and I’m living the only summer of 2026 I’ll ever have. Memories are grand but now is better.
Grandma and Bapa with us kids, summer of 1982.
Me at a Minneapolis park, summer of 1974.
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*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka and their husbands (present and future), Snipp, Snapp, and Snurr.