"...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection." Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

***

Grandma Marian is fond of nuts. (This may explain why she blended into the family so well when, in her fifties, she married my grandfather.) She gave me a recipe for rocky road fudge because it's her favorite. Her chocolate chip cookies always have nuts in them. Her sister sends her pecans for her birthday and for a week she eats them out of their brown paper bag. The meringues a neighbor brings her on a small flowered paper plate wrapped with pink cellophane would be better "if she'd just bake them with nuts inside instead of chocolate chips." And, when Grandma feels up to it, she makes sugared walnuts that taste like Christmas.

It's one of those inexplicable things, really, that those sweet bites of walnut have come to evoke Christmas for me. They were never central to the celebration. I don't think Grandma even made them every year. Yet, eating them reminds me of the flicker of candles on darkened stained glass windows, of the suggestive and tempting bulge of my stocking Christmas morning.

On Christmas Eve, or sometimes Christmas morning, Grandma's Buick-- she has had a series of them-- would pull into the driveway where she would emerge from behind the wheel in her double-knit slacks and shiny blouse, her leather gloves, her sensible shoes. My brother and I would run and hug her, although we dreaded the moment she's pinch our cheeks and say, "Grandma loves you!" We'd unload packages from the trunk, and Grandma would straighten the recycled bows on the gifts, collect her pillow and bag if she was staying over with us, and hand the walnuts or the candy to my mother.

The walnuts didn't impress me much when I was a child. I was acquisitive and entirely commercial: new toys, new books, these were the exciting things. I would eat walnuts during the long Christmas afternoons while the adults napped or talked their strange adult talk in the usually off-limits white-carpeted living room. The walnuts remind me of opened presents, still lying resplendent in their boxes, not yet part of everyday life. They are about the long stretches of time that make up childhood.

And yet my memories are overlaid on other memories, on Grandma's memories. The walnuts are seeds of a different, more distant past as well,having taken root in Grandma's childhood, in Michigan, of which I have no memory.

***

Grandma does not reminisce. She is eighty seven now and just beginning to become feeble. We used to be the same height; she has dwindled a little. Her hair, a short, no-nonsense brush, has whitened from the slate color it was when I was little. Her "figure" remains trim, if a bit thicker around the middle. Her large brown fingers have bulbous knuckles; her rings spin around her fingers below them. But her brown eyes sparkle as always. She wears the same bright colors, the same riotous blouses.

When we talk over a rambunctious lunch with my three-year-old daughter, Sydney, it is more often about Grandma's doctor's appointments than her paintings, more about how difficult it is to walk when the weather is cold or windy than about how challenging it is to find a seamstress who will make her signature bikinis, which cover more than the average tank suit these days. She focuses on the present: the prejudices of the "young" priest at church (he's about fifty), the activities of her great-grandchild, the politics of the art club. The past is past.

But I know some things. Grandma's family was German and Catholic. She grew up with her parents and four sisters: Lou, Leona, Elizabeth, and Ann. Elizabeth died young. Lou, Leona, and Ann married and went off into the world. Marian, my grandma, became a nurse. In her fifties, she met and married my grandfather and they went around the world, settling in California. Later, after his first heart attack, she cared for him through all the indignities of walkers and wheelchairs and bibs until he died.

And I know the photo of Grandma as a little girl, standing, curly-haired, wind-blown, in front of a house with white siding. Just the side of the house is visible. I draw it out as a small but comfortable home in rural Michigan. I know Leona and Ann; I draw them young. Leona bosses everyone around except Lou; Marian and Ann conspire together. Their mother, small and spare like her daughters, listens to the radio as she works with them-- there is always work to do. The girls all cook and clean and mend and sew. Sometimes Ann goes too quickly. Marian plans ahead and lends a hand to keep her out of trouble. In the evening, their father comes home. I see him, stern and brown, wrinkled. He perhaps would lay a big hand on one of their shoulders as an awkward caress. Maybe he knew the names of the birds and flowers and trees that Grandma later painted.

***

Early in December , Sydney and I visit Grandma Marian. A cool day, clear. The golf course on the way to Grandma's house is full of energetic but bent old men in cardigans, determinedly pulling their carts over the little hills. We look for deer, but don't see any.

Grandma is watching for us through the kitchen window; she meets us at the door. We pause in the little entry long enough for Grandma to determine whether a coat or a sweater will be better, to adjust her woolly beret, to change her slippers for her sturdy brown walking shoes. She roots around in her purse to make sure she has the proper glasses, pills, and keys and we're off for yet another lunch at our stand-by restaurant where Sydney can get hot macaroni and cheese.

Our usual route is backed up with extra traffic from road construction, so we drive along some quiet residential streets, twisting and turning our way back to the main road. Pleasant houses on either side seem deserted, everyone off at school or work, only the sun to look through the windows.

Grandma, the good Catholic, has been to mass this morning, like every morning. It is Saint Nicholas day, and the homily was about him and his life.

Definitely a catholic saint, in the lower case sense, Saint Nicholas is patron of seafarers, scholars, virgins, and children. During his lifetime, he was a respected bishop of Myra, in what is now Turkey. Legend says that upon learning of a certain poor man who didn't have the dowry money to marry off his three daughters, Saint Nicholas secretly tossed a bag of money in through the man's window on three successive nights to provide for the girls. As a result of this legend, Saint Nicholas also became the patron saint of gifts.

Grandma tells me that Saint Nicholas day always reminded her of nuts. When she was young, her parents celebrated Saint Nicholas day. After an evening meal around a full table, the girls would hurry to the kitchen to finish the dishes quickly before Saint Nicholas came. Marian no doubt helped Ann, who was the youngest and Marian's favorite sister, to dry the plates and cups. Lou and Leona squabbled over the dishpan, like they always did, Lou bossy and Leona stubborn. Elizabeth perhaps brought in the extra silverware from the table and put away the leftovers. And through it all, they listened. Leona would forget she wasn't talking to Lou: "Did you hear him?" But not yet. First the rattle of spoons into the drawer and the clash of a dropped pot lid. Then, just as they were hanging up the dishtowels to dry, they'd all hear the bang of the screen door and the crash of the bag on the kitchen floor.

Almost every year, the bag broke and nuts and candy scattered into every corner. The girls scrambled to collect the booty and called to mother and father to come and see. Mother would come, her brown eyes bright and laughing, rubbing her hands on her apron. Father would come, hurrying, red-cheeked and cold.

And then they'd sit by the fire or in the lamplight around the table and listen to records. The silver nutcrackers would pass from hand to hand, the grooved walnut shells would mound up in a white bowl. Ann liked the dried fruit best. Elizabeth preferred the chocolates. Lou and Leona tried to capture all the peanut brittle. And Marian ate nuts.

***

Sometimes at Christmas, as I try to organize everything-- collect parents, grandparents, in-laws, children for the celebration-- I am amazed that it all becomes Christmas. In the midst of all the decisions about how to build traditions for my family, I collect talismans. Now, forging together my traditions, my husband's traditions, our own new ideas, we include his decrepit, battery-operated Santa, the candles his mother collected for him, the stockings I have made, Syd's musical moose, and sugared walnuts.