Sugar Cubes
by Arielle McManus
The drive from Arlanda Airport in Stockholm to my grandparents’ house in Ludvika was long, made longer by the fact that my grandpa drove so slowly. To make the time pass, we’d peer out the rear window of the Volvo (as it was the make and model that had the seats in the back that faced outwards) and count the bales of hay wrapped in white plastic that dot the green rolling hills of the farms we’d pass. We’d call them sugar cubes, and we’d make a game of it: whoever counted the most won, extra points for spotting horses, though we never actually kept track of the points. When my grandpa passed away, I wished more than anything that I could have that car, but I felt too bad asking for something that my grandma could get so much money for selling, so instead I asked for his film cameras, his reading glasses, and his bird watching binoculars. The film camera doesn’t work, his reading glasses, I’m told by the optician in Park Slope, are shoddily made, and the only birds around me in Brooklyn are pigeons.
Driving into the little cul-de-sac that my grandma now resides in alone, we’re greeted by all of the sugar cubes, the homes that we nicknamed for their square construction and white stucco finishing. Every one of the homes is two stories tall, and they each have a front yard and a back yard, and each backyard features a deck. Each home has a picket fence around the perimeter of the front yard, and a mailbox, and the color of each matches the color of the roof of the home. Each home has a different color picket fence, mailbox, and roof. For many years, I knew my grandparents’ home as the green one, not as number 16.
Of that home, my favorite room has always been the kitchen. I loved the red gingham apron and matching baking bonnet, the small piggy bank made of clay, and the fact that it was the place that we’d baked fresh cinnamon buns. I loved that there was a bowl just for sugar, and that the bowl had its own spoon that we called the princess spoon. Sometimes we’d go outside in the backyard and pick rhubarb or wild strawberries, and if it was rhubarb we picked, we’d take it inside, lick it at the root, and dip it into the sugar bowl. Just outside of the kitchen was a table, and on that table sat a block of swiss cheese, pocked with holes, a jar of honey brought for us by the neighbors, a newspaper, a TV guide, and a radio that would quietly recount yesterday’s news to us all throughout the day.
In the basement there was a sauna, handbuilt by my grandpa, and my mom would make me stay in it for at least twenty minutes once a week. She believed saunas cured everything, while my dad believed salt water cured everything. It is this fact alone that I think makes it quite clear that she was a Swede, and he, a surfer from a small beach town. It is this fact alone that I think makes it quite clear that they were incompatible, and later divorced.
When I was younger, and my parents would go out for date nights, I’d get upset that they were leaving me behind while going out for a fancy dinner. To make it up to me, they’d bring me home a sugar cube from whichever fancy Manhattan restaurant they went to. They’d come home and walk into the room and sit on the bed, hiding a sugar cube in a closed palm until I’d snap out of my forced anger and reach for it - thereby reaching for them - my ingestion of the cube a silent forgiveness.
My grandma is now selling the sugar cube, unable to make her daily walk into town because of her poor eyesight, hearing, and hips. She’s moving into a smaller apartment in the center of town and she can’t take everything with her to her new home, and so my mom asks what things from the sugar cube I want. I want the wind chime that hangs by the front door and sings with every slow breath of wind, the crystal heart-shaped candelabra that sits on the dining table, the hand-crocheted doilies that my grandma’s grandma made. I want a cutting from the wild strawberry plant, a scrap of the floral wallpaper cut from the bedroom I grew up in, the handsewn quilt that lies on the couch in the den.
My grandma was always an amazing knitter. She could knit anything - sweaters, gloves, bankets, hats, socks. She could cable knit and rib knit and seed knit, she could intarsia knit and fair isle knit. Once when I was younger, she took me to the store and let me pick out any yarn and buttons that I wanted - bubblegum pink mohair and pearly buttons with cats painted on - and she knit me a cardigan. Now she’s so blind it feels like she barely recognizes me. So blind that whenever I write letters to her, I print the letters in size 30 font.
On a night where everyone is speaking in a language too foreign for me to follow, I head out the door and make all the required left turns to get to the lake, and I walk through the brush and sit on the cool stone, slowly edging myself down the steep decline to the dock. The golden light of the slowly setting sun was shining down on the water, which was so still that I had the thought that I could drop a leaf onto its surface and it would create so large of a disturbance that it would disrupt the entirety of the ecosystem. The air smelled of dirt, of wildflowers, of blueberries. Nothing moved, and I liked that I could trick myself into thinking that I was the only person left on the planet in moments like these.
On the flight back to Brooklyn, I am feeling self-pitying. I’m thinking about mushroom picking in the forests, about how many mushrooms there are that look like chanterelles, but are actually poisonous. About how my grandmother will never knit me another sweater. I’m thinking about chopping down our Christmas tree in the woods, and about tradition. About eating kanelbullar on road trip pit stops on wooden benches and about the seats in the back of that Volvo. I’m thinking about all the places I’ve been to and all the places I will never return to, and about how there’s no way for me to know the difference between the two.
Arielle McManus is a writer, learning as she goes and crafting one liners from a tiny, sunlit room in Brooklyn. Her writing has been published by a variety of literary publications including Passages North and Entropy Magazine. She is an assistant editor at Atlas & Alice and a creative writing student at Wesleyan University. More of her work can be found on her site at ariellemcmanus.com.