In the afternoon, she wanted to know about the family photos on the bedroom dresser. There were my grandparents in black-and-white, around the time they married: 1912, when Arizona became a state. They looked pleasantly unsmiling at the camera, he in his narrow tie and coat, she with raven black hair and wearing a high-necked blouse. The mother and father I never knew were in several photos, my father a surprise baby born to grandmother when she was in her thirties, when they didn’t think they could have children. One picture showed him in the war, in his fighter pilot’s jacket and a P-51 Mustang behind him. “Dashing,” Robin commented. All these people looked impossibly young. Another photo: my parents and me as a baby, taken a few weeks before they flew off to Denver and never arrived. I told her stories that didn’t cut too deep.
“You’re lucky to know your past,” she said. “I don’t know anything about my dad. I only knew Linda’s mother a little, we were on the road so much.” Linda being her and Lindsey’s mother, always referred to by her first name.
She sighed and looked at the pictures. “When I was sixteen, one of Linda’s alcoholic boyfriends burned down our garage. All the family photos were lost. You should have seen Lindsey Faith. She was the beauty. I was the ugly duckling.”
“I doubt that,” I said. “I wish I would have asked more when my grandparents were still alive. Grandmother knew the entire family history.”
“So no brothers or sisters,” she said. “What about other family?”
“My grandmother had a sister. She had a beautiful acreage on Seventh Avenue, when it had irrigation ditches on either side and big trees. But she died in 1976.”
“God, you really are alone.”
I sprang up and dug into the closet. “Take a look at this.” I showed her a scrapbook that Grandmother had kept, page after page of old postcards from Phoenix in the 1930s and 1940s. One showed a narrow Central Avenue lushly bordered by palm trees and manicured grass. Other postcards were from places they had visited, plus miniatures of the labels that went on the citrus crates that were shipped out when this was a farm town. “Arizona Beauty.” “Big Town Grapefruit.” “Desert Call.” “Westward Ho.” “Kathy Anne Melons.” All were colorfully, lusciously illustrated in the style of the day.
I told her about the rich agricultural valley this had once been, even when I was young. We grew oranges, grapefruits, lettuce, cabbage, summer squash, tomatoes, beets, strawberries, cucumbers, watermelons and more. Just add water to the alluvial soil of the Salt River Valley and almost anything could flourish, especially with the ingenuity of our farmers and the water from our mighty dams and canals. Phoenix had one of the nation’s largest stockyards and major packinghouses. We shipped our produce all over the nation in long trainloads. It had almost all been lost to tract houses and shopping strips. Without a ten-thousand-mile supply chain, this city would starve. I was grateful my grandparents hadn’t lived to see it.
