Post Falls, Idaho is six hours and thirty-six minutes by car, less if traveling faithfully south on the western outline of the state (impossible in actuality due to a lack of roads that track that outline) from the city of Homedale, Idaho, where my grandparents lived when I was a child.

Homedale was not a city of tourism and nostalgic truck stops like Post Falls, and the only falls to be found there were of a more personal nature. Homedale was a city of working poor that saw themselves as separated by race rather than as unified by economics. I can imagine that many of the people of Homedale dreamed of road trips to places like Post Falls. The city of Post Falls was named in honor of the majesty of the rivers and mountains that surrounded it. Homedale was named Homedale because someone drew that name out of a hat.

My grandparents lived on a farm but they weren’t farmers. My grandfather was a career Army man so I assume he must have been retired when I visited him and my grandmother as a child of ten in the summer of 1988. Was that the case? Did my grandparents retire to, of all places, Homedale, Idaho?

It was a hot summer the only time I ever visited. One for the record books, I heard. I remember eating big red tomatoes warmed by the sun, plucked from the plant and sliced and salted and served on tea plates in mid-afternoon. I remember walking the fields around the house with my grandfather, picking blackberries off of overgrown vines and popping them into our mouths, bursting and sour. I remember a movie theater parking lot beaten by the sun, full of teenagers headed to or from one of the two movies available to them in the summer of 88 in the city of Homedale, Idaho, and I remember being shocked by their language and wondering if I would ever be cool. I remember foolishly being embarrassed that I was at the movies with my grandparents.

If you had asked me then if my grandparents were in love, I would have told you yes because they were married and because I was ten. If you ask me that same question now, as a woman of 40, I will tell you that I don’t know. My grandmother was devastated when my grandfather died a decade ago. She has been half of herself since then, and I imagine will be for the remainder of her life. Isn’t that proof of love? Ten year old me would have thought so. But as I came into my teenage years I began to hear stories of my grandfather the alcoholic, and of my grandmother as a homely seventeen year old who married the only man who offered.

The mythologies of childhood are far removed from the realities of womanhood. Those blackberries off the vine gave me food poisoning and bloody diarrhea and as a result I spent three days at the age of ten in a diaper, laying in sweat in the back of a van with no a/c traveling from Homedale, Idaho to Modesto, California to visit more family, sipping, of all things, a baby bottle full of grape juice because my grandmother thought the sugar would be good for me but she didn’t want stains on the upholstery.

She and I are no closer now than we were then. Has she enjoyed her life? I don’t know. Was there a time in her life when she thought, “This is it. Right now, at this moment, I am perfectly happy.” I could ask her, but I won’t.