Sept. 4: The old saw

 

That old saw hangs on the wall of Grandma’s Country Kitchen, a small town diner in one of the larger hamlets or small towns that dot the county. Grandma is a former farmer’s wife who opened the eatery after her husband died of a heart attack some years ago. She gets some help from her son, who works at a big accounting firm in the city, and from a couple of teenaged girls who wait on tables when they’re not too busy playing soccer or going on dates. But most of the work is done by Grandma herself, who takes pride in the fact that everything in her restaurant is homemade.

That bread that was in your sandwich? It wasn’t store bought. Grandma baked it herself. The eggs? She buys them from a local organic egg farmer – that’s why the yolks are so big and so orange and so flavourful. The ham in Grandma’s Famous Homemade Ham Sandwich isn’t from the Save on Foods deli either. Grandma bakes her own ham, marinating it in her own mixture of sauces and spices first. There’s no expansive menu at Grandma’s Country Kitchen and more often than not you’ll go in there and find there’s only one item being offered – take it or leave it.

Grandma won’t tell you her real name, insists that everyone call her Grandma instead – even the ladies who are as old as she is. If you wanted to, you could go to the town hall and see whose name is on the restaurant lease, but that just wouldn’t be proper, wouldn’t be right. It would destroy the mystique of Grandma’s Country Kitchen.

She used the money her husband left her to open the restaurant. She found the empty storefront, which used to be a video store until the online streaming market made those things obsolete, and signed a three-year lease. Her son recommended she hire an interior decorator to make the place look like a country kitchen and so she had hired a lady from the city who had panelled the walls with planks of heavily sanded and thrice-stained oak, so smooth that running your finger over it was like touching glass. Then came the country accoutrements – the needlepoints, the tin John Deere tractor signs, and yes, that old saw.

The saw was a long one, the kind two strong lumberjacks might have used to cut down a thick spruce. It was the focal point of the northern wall, the one you saw when you walked into the kitchen and looked to your left. The blades of the saw had been filed down so they were just a ghost of their former sharpness. It was fastened to the wall by hooks and screws and nails, so sturdy that it didn’t even wobble when you touched it. It had been painted white and then, on top of that whiteness, someone had painted a panorama of a country scene. There was a garden in the foreground, one filled with purple and pink flowers and tomato plants and garden gnomes and baby trees. Two little girls ran through this garden. They were holding dollies and they were smiling because there was nothing in their make believe cartoon world that would cause them to frown in the first place.  Everything in that old saw land was beautiful, an inducer of happiness.

The diners of Grandma’s Country Kitchen often asked about the saw and Grandma would tell them she picked it up at a country auction somewhere. She said she had no idea of its history – that it had started its life as a tool, an ancient artifact of masculine necessity that would now die as a feminine accoutrement.

Grandma never told them the whole truth. It was true that she had bought that old saw at a country auction. What she didn’t tell them was that she had painted it herself. She also didn’t tell them about her two twin daughters who, when they were eight years old, had fallen into an old well on their neighbour’s property and had both died on impact.

She also doesn’t tell her diners that sometimes, after Grandma’s Country Kitchen has closed for the day, she will draw the curtains, pour herself a glass of scotch, light a cigarette,and sit down at one of the tables and drink and smoke over the course of an hour or so. She doesn’t talk when she does this. She never has company. She never reads or listens to music. She just sits there and looks at that old saw.