My favorite day has always been Saturday. Although these days my Saturdays usually consist of waking up midmorning and relaxing the day away, they used to be really exciting and something I looked forward to throughout the week. When I was a kid, Saturdays meant the best thing ever: going to Gramma and Grampa’s house. My mom’s parents lived in Abbotsford B.C. and every Saturday my mom, sister and I would load into our purple minivan and brave the border crossing to visit.

The House was a rusty brick red color and over a hundred years old. Trees were free to grow wherever they pleased throughout the large front and back yard, which were connected by the large, extensive, intricate garden that wove around the right side of the house and trickled into the backyard. The left side of the yard was home to the gravel driveway, a couple apple trees and a large fenced in pasture full of the neighbors sheep. One of the most fun times of the year would be when all of the partially rotten apples would fall from out of reach in the trees to the ground. Then we would feed them to, and befriend, the sheep. The sheep would wait at the fence day after day for the few weeks the ground was littered with them, then would go back to being the stuck-up, people-hating, sheep they were the other 48 weeks of the year or so.

When we finally arrive to grandmas my sister and I would race to the front porch steps, which resembled those of an attic: tall, skinny, and in the rain a recipe for disaster. Inside was a mash of mismatched but matching furniture atop creaky floorboards. After the ‘howdy’s’, hugs, and kisses we’d sit around a bit before we all crammed into one car and adventured to the local non-profit thrift store we knew as the MCC. My sister I would run wild trying to uncover hidden toy treasures, while mom and grandma checked out home goods and craft supplies. My Grampa spent his time in the back of the basement of the building, tinkering with the half-working and unsellable glass-tube televisions. He volunteered his time there fixing the usually barely broken TV’s so the store could sell them instead of having to pay to have them recycled. After Grampa finished, and loaded his unfinished project TV’s into the trunk, we’d visit a few other thrift or discount stores and the Dutch deli before returning back home for lunch.

Lunch was almost always the same too. Usually soup, most of the time chicken noodle of an always slightly different Canadian variety, deli scrap and Dutch cheese sandwiches and saltines. After lunch I was free to do whatever I wished. I loved to roam around the huge yard, which to my small mind and body seemed to expand forever and never came to end, except for the front road of course. The grass grew slow and long under the shade of the trees. The back and right side yard gradually transitioned into full blown uninviting old-growth forest that for the most part went unexplored throughout my childhood, until the day Tiger the cat died and needed a peaceful place to be buried.

One of my favorite things to do was walk to the concrete slab placed awkwardly in the back left corner of the yard. You had to walk past Grampas junk pile, a hideous mountain of broken and sharp TV skeletons and hundreds of snapped lines of once functioning Christmas lights to get to it. When I say hundreds that’s not an exaggeration either, Gramma and Grampa made the front page of the paper every year for their amazing Christmas light display. The house was lit from roof to base, with all sorts of lights my Gramma had accumulated over the years, some handmade pieces, and at least a hundred glowing Santas. People from all over the province sometimes would drive in just to see the product of the life-threatening hours and hours each of my grandparents had spent at the tippy top of a ladder.
Littered around the slab of concrete were my half-sunk-in-mud, metal Tonka Trucks. Atop it was many old wooden box TV’s with dials instead of buttons, some gutted out, some still completely intact. These served as kitchen counters, cupboards and ovens to my imagination, and I would spend hours baking elaborate mud meals with the discarded dishes and utensils, complete with mud pie for dessert. And when I was done, I’d leave them out for the rain to wash throughout the week so they would be nice and kind of clean for the next Saturdays adventure.

By mid to late afternoon I’d hear the recognizable slam of the old wooden door to Grampas workshop. The shop was located right behind the house and kind of to the left. I’d walk the dimpled and cracked cement walkway, careful not to break my mother’s back, that led to the shop. The inside was a mash of wooden work benches and dozens of televisions, their thousands of little parts, and enough dust to probably thinly layer the entire earth. Lit only by a couple free hanging light bulbs, it was very dim inside. I would sit next to and work with my Grampa on his TV’s with the help of his headlamp.

When things got too difficult for small hands and limbs to handle I’d venture back into the yard and roam around the garden before being called inside for dinner. Dinner was always one of three meals too. We’d either have KFC picked up by my gramps, a typical (but delicious) meat&potatoes meal but always with homemade and fried noodles, or my favorite, Mumma Pandas all you can eat buffet. While stuffing our faces we would talk, and Grampa, a couple beers in, would tell dirty jokes that I wouldn’t understand until I was much older. Soon Grampa would disappear only to reappear with his family-famous guitar. The beat up brown wood peeked out from behind the poor painting job that destroyed its value so many years ago.
Story goes that the guitar used to belong to the one and only Johnny Cash, my gramps’s idol. He won it in a drunken bet from his buddy, losing only a two-stringed banjo. Grampa used to be, and still is a pretty dandy musician. He used to play and perform with Loretta Lynn. When Loretta struck it big he was faced with the choice of going with her and performing all over the world, but he instead decided to stay true to his roots and chose to stay home, where his day job was breeding cows. I often wondered if Grampa ever regretted his decision to stay home or not.
Grampa would play, loud and silly, and we would grab at and pluck the strings when instructed to with the help of his callused, guiding hands. One sunset and a couple of bowls of ice cream later I’d slowly lose track of how droopy my eyelids had become. I’d enter that half-asleep point of childhood consciousness, the only things keeping me away from dream world being the goodbyes, soft kisses, and the short walk to car, spent carried by Grampa.
The next thing I knew it was already morning and I would be stuck in bed trying to recall the last few events of the previous night, and the countdown to Saturday would begin once again.