By Sallie Lewis Longoria
It’s coming on Christmas, and up and down my street, twinkle lights glow softly, like summer fireflies. While my own home will soon be decked for the holidays, the house next door remains dark and shuttered, a lingering reminder of what I lost. My grandparents – who I called Honey and Popo – were many things to me. Friends, first and foremost, role models, teachers, travel advisors, and much later in life, next-door neighbors. Together since they were fourteen, Honey and Popo’s union lasted over seventy years. Sharing a fence line with my grandparents brought my husband and I much closer to them not only physically but also emotionally. A bald spot in the brush marks the threshold we crossed en route to say hello over the weeks, months, and years we were together.
When Honey passed away in October 2017, she left a void in our lives only a matriarch can. Less than one year later, in August of this year, Popo passed as well, marking the close of a chapter. This Christmas will be our first without them and while the lights in their house won’t be coming on, I am reminded of the metaphorical light and enduring joy they leave behind.
Sometime after Honey passed, it occurred to me that while she was physically gone, her words lived on in the novel and travel journals she wrote over the course of her life. In an effort to fill the void, I went searching for these journals and found them, stored away in the dusty cupboards of my grandparents’ library. To my surprise, by exhuming them, I found not only their typed stories but their voices and memories alive and waiting on the page.
Travel was a cornerstone of my grandparents’ lives. Over many decades, they traveled, just the two of them, crisscrossing the globe in myriad vessels, from barges and balloons to trains and airplanes.
Slowly, as time passed and life became more generous, they included their three children and nine grandchildren on their trips. Over the course of eighteen years, we traveled as a family around the globe. Every year we journeyed somewhere new, from the Cape of Good Hope to Fiji’s Wakaya Island, from the fairytale castles of Bavaria to the sandy shores of the South Pacific. We tasted Peking duck in Beijing and bonded beneath a galaxy of stars in the Tanzanian Selous. By including us on these exploits, Honey and Popo bridged a generational gap and created a family like few others. Even more, their generosity and exploratory spirits instilled an insatiable wanderlust in each of us.
As my grandparents grew older and their mobility declined, they never lost their appetite for adventure. Cruises became a convenient way to see even more of the world. These voyages took them to Russia, the Caribbean, and to South America, where they rounded the legendary Cape Horn and rode on catamarans through Chilean ice fields, witnessing the heaving groans of glaciers in motion.
For two people whose passion was fine dining, it is no surprise that France beckoned with its gastronomic fanfare. Of all the places they went together, the city of light would always be most beautiful in their eyes. In Paris, my grandparents savored some of life’s pleasures, from browsing the bookstalls along the Seine to window shopping in the Rive Gauche and stopping for lunch at a sidewalk café. Paris, likewise, is where my husband and I fell in love. In many ways, the French city is a bridge between their lives and ours.
Today, I see these epistles of my grandparents’ travels as invitations for reflection and inspiration for journeys to come. When I get sad or hungry for their love, I can open to new pages and break bread at their table. With every paragraph, I can taste their shared meals, from the sweetbreads and filets of sole, to the lobsters in cream and saddles of venison.
The journals pulse with a life all their own. On any given page, I can revisit the places we shared together and those I have yet to see. I can travel back to Toledo, with its ancient walls and orange sunsets. I can view the olive trees rippling down the sun-drenched Spanish hillsides. I can picture the quaintness of the Cotswolds, with its pastoral sheep and manicured manor houses. I can hear the strains of Puccini and one of my grandparents’ favorite Perry Como songs, The Best Of Times, as they unpacked and repacked, moving ever-forward. I can see Sardinia, and the enchanting hotel etched into rock. I can travel north to the Norwegian Fjords and bask in their haunting quiet. I can view flowering fields of yellow colza and ruby poppies in the south of France. On yet another page, I can journey back to 2009 and see my cousins circled around me, clapping and cross-legged while drinking kava from a polished coconut. In the span of a paragraph, I can dine like a queen at my grandparents’ favorite Paris restaurant. Together, we order duck a l’ orange and wild strawberries laced with spun sugar. High above the rose gold dining room, the ceiling retracts, revealing the starry heavens, and I know they are with me, evermore.
This summer, on a trip to Europe, my husband and I used these journals as our guide. It was my first trip to Switzerland and we drove to Lausanne, where my grandparents stayed at LeBeau-Rivage Palace, back in 1994. As I sat on the hotel patio, overlooking the ground’s manicured gardens and the boats on Lac Leman, I felt I was glimpsing the world through their rose-colored eyes. Later that summer, I traveled to Venice and watched the evening light linger on the canals from Harry’s Bar. It was here in this popular restaurant, back in 1985, where my grandparents sipped martinis and shared a similar wonderment for this ancient floating city.
Every time I scroll through the journals’ four-hundred-plus pages, I see new adventures yet to uncover, as if they’ve been wrapped in tissue and stored for safekeeping. Often, I’m surprised by experiences I didn’t know we’d shared. My grandparents’ white-knuckled drives in Northern Portugal remind of my own memories on Italy’s hairpin roads. Their trip to the Dordogne Valley, peering into prehistoric caves, mimicked similar adventures of mine from a few years prior. Most surprising of all was their trip around the world in 1997.
Fast forward nearly 20 years and my honeymoon would take a serendipitously similar path. Without knowing it, my husband and I followed the footpaths of my late grandparents, traveling through Bali, Singapore, Bangkok and Phuket, while passing through some of the same hotels and restaurants my grandparents did years earlier. On this trip, they encountered as we did the Hindu temples in Bali, the spirit houses in Thailand, and monks clad in saffron-colored robes. With every changing culture, my grandparents and I were drawn to the differing ways people worship.
Honey and Popo were born and raised Catholic though I like to believe they were also very spiritual at heart. They found beauty everywhere and were touched by the ephemeral, fleeting nature of life. Wherever they traveled, Honey found a place to light a candle in prayer for her family back home. The side altars of Notre Dame and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and St. Peter’s Basilica have all been touched by her undying faith. Equally holy to Honey were the small village chapels she found along the way. One such chapel she returned to time and again was a small, stark structure in Saint Paul de Vence. It was here where she felt a profound inner quiet. If I close my eyes, I can envision her there today, aglow and awash in angelic candlelight.
In The Measure Of Our Success, author Marian Wright Edelman talks of “the sound of the genuine” that speaks within each of us. I firmly believe Honey and Popo listened to the sound of the genuine within their own hearts and let that guide them on their journey through life. While building a family was their driving purpose, traveling together strengthened their thanksgiving for one another. In the end, all the meals and museums and experiences shared were made meaningful through their companionship. Today more than ever I cling to these journals to stay close to their legacy of love. I find comfort that life endures, and that the words therein are like footprints which will guide me to new places and plentiful tables, until we meet again.
Sallie Lewis Longoria is a Texas-based writer and holds a Master’s Degree in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. She has traveled to more than 30 countries and is currently at work on her first novel.