Chiri was the youngest grandchild. By the time she was born, some of her older cousins were going home to Grandma to have babies. There had been one younger grandchild, but he had died, and Chiri returned to her baby status. By virtue of being the smallest, she was Grandpa's pet. There was a room set aside, at the time the house was built, as a "front parlor." The only entrance to this room was through the long front hall which led everywhere in the house. The front parlor was reserved for company and by deliberate design was inconvenient to the rest of the house. By the time Chiri's grandparents left the house, it was already old. The need for a formal parlor was quickly obliterated by human need. It provided a half-way private room for whoever needed it at the time. Babies were born there with some regularity. Chiri and the baby who died had both been born in that room. Often the room sheltered somebody who was recuperating from an illness, and occasionally somebody would be brought there to die. In those times and circumstances, folks seldom went to the hospital, even to die. They couldn't afford it. There was a huge mulberry tree in the back yard. It was a spreading green giant with twiggy branches like millions of large, leafily disguised spiders' legs. It cooled the long back porch with wavering shadows in summer, and detoured the determined wind in winter. Chiri remembered the sweet-tart taste of the large squishy berries. As they blackened on the branches, swarms of grandchildren picked them from precarious perches. They were rewarded later when Grandma made mulberry jam. Chiri remembered sitting in the dusty shade under the tree with a thick slice of bread and jam, and the sticky sweetness of the jam running down her chin as it dribbled off the bread. Sometimes the jam dripped through the holes in the bread onto her fingers. She was careful to lick it all off cleanly, and sometimes was so thorough that Grandma let her pass clean-hands inspection for the next meal. Grandpa was a big man. Aunt Grace said he was just six feet tall. To Chiri's small self he was the biggest man in all the world. She was so little. Everything was bigger than life-size then, the house, the rooms, the mulberry tree, and the big round-chested man who was her dead mother's father. Grandpa's family must have often been a burden to him, both physically and financially, but if they were, they never knew it. He used to sit in a straight backed chair on the front porch. The chair would be tilted back onto two legs, leaning against the house. His feet still touched the floor in front of it, and the round lenses of his glasses blinked in the sun as Chiri bounded down the boardwalk to him. Just as she reached him, the front legs of the chair came down and he leaned forward to catch her in his arms. She, had knocked his gold-rimmed spectacles off his forehead once, and cried because she was afraid they were broken. They weren't. Grandpa pulled out a clean white handkerchief and breathed moisture on the glass to clean them as he told her a story about a man who lost his glasses. "People don't always need what they think they do," Grandpa explained. "Now this man wore his spectacles for years and years. Never went without them a day. I heard him say more than once that he was near-blind without them. He didn't have any money to buy new ones, and I'll tell you that when he lost them, he had everybody and their cousins in a dither looking for them. Never did find them until a couple of years later when somebody opened a book he'd been reading a long time before, and there they were, being used as a bookmark. By that time, though, he'd found out he didn't need those spectacles at all." Chiri's favorite nap spot when she was small was across the wide barrel of Grandpa's chest. Her nose would be hidden somewhere in his neck under his ear, and her rear end stuck out over the ridge of his opposite arm. She grew out of that phase reluctantly. Her torso became too long to fit, and her legs dangled too far. She felt she had grown too much, too fast, too soon. She was four years old when her father woke her in the middle of the night and took her down stairs to the front parlor to say goodbye to her mother. She didn't understand what was going on. In the safety of her father's arms she had looked down at the waxen face of her mother, and had dutifully kissed the death-moist cheek when he bent her down for that purpose. She heard her father strangle a little in his throat, but before she could turn to look at him, she had been transferred to Grandpa's arms, and Grandma was tearfully showing her a strange baby she held. That baby was Chiri's new little brother. He always remained little, because he died too, a short three years later. It was one of the few times during those years when a member of the family went to the hospital. Maybe if his mother had been there, he wouldn't have gone to the hospital either. The family was convinced that the child would have lived if he'd been taken home to Grandma and Grandpa for the care that only they could give. Chiri believed it herself because they pulled her older brother through when he came down with the same sickness a short time later. When the older boy got sick, they all went to Grandma and Grandpa's house for the duration of his illness. Grandpa believed in isolating sick folks, for their good and the good of others, so Chiri wasn't allowed in the big front parlor. She was allowed a cubby hole room upstairs for her very own. She clattered her way constantly up the stairs to that little room. She slid down the bannister, but stomped her way back up. Grandma thought sick folks needed quiet, too, but how could she tell Chiri's shoes to be silent when the child herself spoke in whispers? The family parlor was across the hall from the front parlor. When the 16 family wasn't congregated in the kitchen that stretched itself full-length across the back of the house, they would be gathered about a black and silver, pot-bellied stove in the family parlor. Chiri's most vivid memory of her grandmother was seeing her sitting at an old treadle sewing machine in front of an east window in the family parlor early one morning. Grandma's hair never went gray. It was so dark that Aunt Grace said it was black, but Chiri remembered the red-gold highlights the winter sun fired in it. White spears of light pierced the frosty window panes, and mixed with the highlights in her hair to form a white-gold halo around her bent head. She was making a pair of soft slippers for Chiri, out of an assortment of woolen rags and bright leftover materials, hoping the little girl would wear them in the house and particularly on the stairs. The slippers were worn out when Chiri went back to her own house, but she saved them. They were in an old trunk in her basement. Only Aunt Grace knew they were there, and what they meant to Chiri. Sometimes the slippers would remind her how everything wore out, even houses, and even humanity. Grandma and Grandpa wore out in the love-service of others. Grandma and Grandpa had such a large family that even their huge gateleg table couldn't accommodate them all, not even when all the leaves were added and it was expanded to its banquet length. Many times the smaller children sat up at an ironing board that had been laid over the backs of two straight chairs, and ate Grandma's remarkable cooking. When the weather turned cold, the big kitchen was a warm retreat of delicious smells and cozy warmth. The hungry iron-monster stove was fed coal and wood until it belched heat into the room. Even the dull black chimney turned hot orange as the fire roared past the damper into it. In summertime the tantalizing odors still emanated from the reg- ion of the stove, but the children escaped the furnace it made of the kitchen and went outside to play in the shade of the beloved mulberry tree. There was a dirt cellar under the house. Chiri shivered with anticipated adventure when she went down the creaky stairs with Grandpa and helped him dig in piles of sandy dirt for potatoes or parsnips or carrots. Sometimes she searched for a certain kind of fruit or vegetable that Grandma needed, from among the row after row of sparkling bottles that lined the black dirt walls of the cellar. She never went down the cellar alone. First of all, she didn't have enough strength to lift the big heavy trap door on the back porch that led down into it. Second, she didn't have the courage. The cellar was moist and dark and ghostly. Electricity hadn't found its way down there. Grandpa kept an old coal-oil lantern on a hook above the trap door, and he would light the lantern to illuminate the way down those rickety steps into that spooky hole under the house. Grandma's last years were spent in the family parlor of the old house. She could no longer navigate the steep and winding stairs, so her bed was brought down and set up in one corner of the parlor near a front window so she could see outside. Grandpa cared for her, for many long years. Most of Chiri's later memories of the house placed the big iron bedstead in the front room. Chiri remembered the absolute cold severance of death too well. A group of cousins, with Chiri tagging behind them, entered the dusky front hall, to be intercepted by Aunt Grace, who came out of the center kitchen door at the far end of the hall. She put her finger to her lips to silence the children's perpetual noise as she aproached them, and Chiri saw a tear fall from her eyelashes onto her hand. "We didn't mean to make you cry, Aunt Grace," she whispered. Grace couldn't speak for a minute. She smoothed the glossy dark curls on Chiri's head, then brushed the tears away, and finally managed to tell the children that their grandmother was gone. Chiri didn't fully understand that she'd never see her grandmother alive again, but she remembered and understood, a short time later, when Grandpa followed Grandma to the grave, and their family seemed to crumble around the big old house. For a short time, Aunt Grace's oldest sister lived on in the house, but finally even she moved away. Strangers came and went, each leaving their marks on the house, but it was always "Grandma and Grandpa's house" to Chiri. Without their unifying force, the family drifted their separate ways. In an affluent society they didn't have the economic need of each other that they once did. Sometimes years would go by when Chiri didn't see some of her cousins. Only a wedding or a death would bring them together again. But there was always Aunt Grace. Having never married, she clung more to her brothers and sisters and their families than she might have otherwise. When Chiri was widowed, Aunt Grace naturally moved in to help with the children so Chiri could go to work to support them. As Aunt Grace aged, she leaned to the sentimental past, and pulled Chiri backward in time with her. When Aunt Grace talked about the dusky past, Chiri's children yawned. They looked at the old woman as if she were speaking of another universe, something alien to all they knew. But Chiri wasn't alien. She was the link between generations. She understood how the children felt, and a little bit about Aunt Grace's view. Her memory wasn't as green as Grace's, but the things the old woman recalled were an inherent part of Chiri, a little section of her life known as childhood. "I want you to drop me off at the house on your way to town today," Aunt Grace announced as she pulled on her gloves and poked