GRANDFATHER'S SWEATER

 

My grandfather's sweater is a pure wool cardigan the color of lettuce, with dark green buttons backed with a gray silk tacking. Woven and sewn in England, it's a fifty-year-old antique in perfect shape, a far more expensive garment than I would ever buy for myself, and I take better care of it than I do any of my own clothes. I knew my grandfather only when I was young; he was, to me, a nattily dressed stock-broker who joked a lot and played something called "Shoo Fly Pie" on the piano, and my father brought the sweater to me in San Francisco after my grandfather died in Tennessee. It's the only thing of his I have, and it pleases me to wear it on chilly mornings when I write. I take care never to soil it or tear it, and I summer it in mothballs. But it's a forty-six and I'm a forty-two, so it hangs too low, the shoulders droop, and the sleeves puff up behind the cuffs.  This gives me the feeling when it's on me that the past is bigger than the present. -- CWS

 

HOUSE ON THE GULF

 

If you have ever been down toward the Gulf, you know the kind of house. White frame, but with the glitter long gone. One story, a wide gallery across the front with spindly posts supporting the shed over it. A tin roof, with faint streaks of rust showing red in the channel joints. The whole thing set high on brick pillars, to make a cool cobweb-draped cloister underneath, screened on the front side with rank ligustrums and canna beds, for hens to congregate and fluff in the dust and an old shepherd dog to lie and pant in the hot days. It sits pretty well back from the road, in a lawn gone sparse and rusty in the late season. On each side of an anarchronistic path of concrete walk, which dies blankly at the gate where the earth of the highway shoulder shows raw, there are two round flower beds made by laying an old automobile tire on the ground and filling them with wood earth. There are a few zinnias in each, hairy like an animal, brilliant in the dazzling sun. At each end of the house is a live oak, not grand ones. Beyond the house, flanking it on each side are the chicken houses and barns, unpainted. But the faded-white decent house itself, sitting there in the middle of the late-summer afternoon, in the absolute quiet of that time of day and year, with the sparse lawn and tidy flower beds and the prideful patch of concrete walk in front, the oaks at each side, is like nothing so much as a respectable, middleaged woman, in a clean gray gingham dress, with white stockings and black kid shoes, the pepper-and-salt hair coiled on her head, sitting in her rocker with her hands folded across her stomach to take a little ease, now the day's work is done and the menfolks are in the field and it's not yet time to think about supper and strain the evening milk. -- Robert Penn Warren.