litlinks 2021

The Sentimentalist

by Nicky Greer-Collins, Daramalan College

The red ribbon was not what I had expected to find when I went through my grandmother’s possessions. It had been a long day, and a sad one, clearing out that cheerless room at the nursing home where she had spent the last year of her life.

My grandmother had not been a sentimental woman. A loving and kind woman, yes. A wonderful cook and storyteller, a caring mother and the bosom of our family, certainly. But sentiment for things, objects, tchotchkes or knick-knackery of any kind she kept no truck with.

In hindsight, it made sense for her not to be attached to things. For things could be had. Things could be held. Things could be loved. But things were inconstant. Things could be taken from you. Things could be ripped from your arms and dashed to pieces upon the ground in front of you by men who dragged your family away. Men who dragged them away screaming to be turned to ash in great furnaces behind the prison fences crisscrossing the lush green fields of your homeland.

So it came as something of a surprise when digging through my unsentimental grandmother’s meagre possessions on the day she died, that I came across an envelope,  yellow and mottled with age, and stuffed full of…something.

I turned it over in my hands, front to back. It looked fragile. I raised it to my face and breathed it in. It smelled like her. Lilac perfume, cigarettes and talcum powder, but mixed with something else: the vaguely familiar and musty scent of mothballs. Faded copperplate writing on the back seemed as though etched with rust. Letters swirled together in unfamiliar patterns, strange combinations of consonants and umlauts in her native Hungarian that seemed as mysterious to me as they were unpronounceable.

I opened the envelope and the long, red ribbon spooled out into my hands. Against the aged and fragile paper that held it, the colour was brilliant. Made of inch-wide satin, it seemed to pour from the envelope like liquid fire. I marvelled at its rich, crimson texture as I stretched it to its full length from my left hand to my right, weaved it in-and-out between my fingers; such a contrast to the brittle paper of the envelope which had held it.

And there at the bottom of the envelope, beneath that glossy burst of colour, sat tucked away a small, sepia-toned photograph. I carefully fished it out between my forefinger and my thumb, freeing it from the confines of the space that had held it for how many years? Who knew.

The photograph showed my grandmother as a small child. She could have been no older than five or six years, dressed in a frock coat with socks that came up to her knees and polished buckle-up shoes. She stood leaning against a gate in a country lane, head tilted shyly to the side, her hand clutching a sprig of…was it lavender? A fat hen fussed at her feet.

And there, in my tiny grandmother’s hair, tying it back from her face into a neat bunch atop her head – an inch-wide, shining ribbon tied in a bow.

And I, a sentimental bastard, wept.