Cat

Can you have a love-hate relationship with a thermos? ###
That’s a rhetorical question. Of course you can. ###
The inside smells like lemonade. No, like the endless, mythical sunshine that blesses every childhood memory I have of our summers at the lake, the breeze-tickled water glittering with sparkling clichés. Even the rainy days were sunny, illuminated by our joy in each other, in family love and warmth and understanding.###
Yeah, right. Maybe it’s just that it smells like the best times we ever had. ###
During the school year, those long, morbid months of brick walls and concrete floors, asphalt and broken glass-littered vacant lots, I’d dream of the lake. Dream of days where Mom would lie in a hammock and read six months worth of The New Yorker while Dad thumbed through recipes ripped from in-flight magazines, looking for something he could make with ingredients available at the one-room market that catered to vacationers. ###
Most of our dinners in the wood-shake cottage involved fish, caught by me and Grandpop during hours of floating together from one shady hollow to another. We’d only use the dinghy’s motor if lightening threatened – summers were slowtime, the antidote to the rush of normal life. ###
“Did you ever think,” he’d ask, “it just doesn’t get any better than this?” He’d lean back in the stern, dig another Marlboro out of the carton in the drywell. “Anymore of that lemonade?” ###
I’d hoist the thermos up from the lake’s cool depths, the lanyard dripping rainbows. “Can you get me one of these?” I asked him once. ###
“Sure, munchkin. Just a ‘nother couple cartons. If Grandmomma was still here, we’d have it for you already.” ###
Grandmomma had loved getting something for nothing – she’d drive out of her way to get gas at the station giving away shot glasses, buy 10 cans of creamed corn just to get one free. That thermos was not just proof of her brand loyalty – it was proof of her thriftiness, and of her sway over her husband. He’d been a Camel man until he met her. ###
That thermos was the last freebie Grandmomma scored before she died. In fact, it showed up at the house along with a delivery of sympathy lilies. Grandpop briefly considered using it to hold Grandmomma’s ashes, but in the end, he went with the tasteful cloisonné urn that almost matched her favorite lamp. ###
For two more years, the thermos held the taste of golden days, warm nights and fireflies, floating weightless above the chill water. Then Grandpop’s cough got worse, just like Grandmomma’s had before the end, and the chill moved right off the water and into the cottage. That last summer, the thermos stayed indoors, right by the side of the hospital bed installed in the front room, where Grandpop could look out the big window at the sunshine kicking sparks off the lake.###
Mom and Dad didn’t want the thermos after Grandpop was gone. Mom gave up smoking right away; Dad took another couple years, but eventually, he threw out the last of the cartons of Marlboro’s he’d hauled out of his father’s house, along with a 1937 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica in which World War II was still just a looming threat. He kept the encyclopedia, despite its weighty uselessness.###
I kept the thermos. It sits in that blank space at the top of my kitchen cabinets, waiting for the day that I’ll have time again for lakes and fish and family. Sometimes I take it down and breathe in that ghostly lemonade smell. I imagine I can smell Grandpop’s tobacco on the handle, stained a faint yellow that could be nicotine, or just age. ###
Maybe someday I’ll throw it away. But probably not. I’m still hoping those weren’t the best times I’ll ever, ever have.