My grandmother kept a modest bookshelf. The top few rows held her photo albums, folios filled with memories of her people, her travels, the playbills of operas she’d seen. Then there were her Dutch books, ancient volumes that have seen more of the world than I have. The writings of philosophers and psychologists, books from her youth that followed her for the rest of her life.
Below those shelves sat her fiction. I’ll always think of her when I see People of the Book, not because she ever mentioned to me that she particularly liked it but because it was what she had on her side table when I’d visit her seventeen years ago. The cover really etched itself into my mind. In her last months, she read The Dutch House. I would ask her about it when I’d visit, curious to hear what she thought of Ann Patchett’s writing. “Well, it’s not very Dutch,” she answered, a sly smile on her face. As a native of the Netherlands, I could tell she was a bit disappointed. When she passed and we had to gather up her belongings, it was easy to tell which books were the ones she prized. Her children’s children’s books, grown brittle and yellowed from years of shelf-life. The foreign language dictionaries that helped her to forge a new life, first in North America and then in the South, before finding her way up to Tennessee. The rows of photo-albums that extended past the modest bookshelf, into her guest room and closet. We kept all of that, minus some photo-albums, but we also kept some of the other ones too. The one’s that reminded us not just of the places she went and what she accomplished there, but of who she was when you’d visit her on a Saturday in August and ask her about The Dutch House. The ones that transport us back to those childhood visits. The ones that remind you that a person weaves a long and storied tapestry of life over one hundred years, but at the far end of that weaving there’s still a smiling Oma ready to crack a few jokes and offer you something to snack on.
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