By Josh Feyen

I felt good moving into your basement a few days after I graduated from high school. A family friend had lined up a painting job for me in Milwaukee, but I needed to find a place to live. You had a cool and dry basement, a twin bed, and a lamp—that’s all I really needed. After my first day of scraping, priming, and painting apartment units, you were the first adult to offer me a drink. We sipped Southern Comfort in your back yard under the blue evening sky and began to get to know one another as adults. We were single. We were drinking. And neither of us had any obligations to be anywhere else except with one another.

I didn’t know anyone in Milwaukee except a few other relatives spread across the city. After Grandpa died, you moved from your rural farmhouse to your smaller city house, and family gatherings shifted to other homes—though you did host my graduation party in your backyard because, for now, it was my backyard too. We kept one another company that summer. You didn’t care where I went, what I did, or how I spent my time. Yet you expected me to do my fair share of household chores–nothing more, and nothing less.

We hadn’t discussed rent before I moved in, and you didn’t seem concerned about it. But I wanted to contribute in some small ways. I carried the new cat litter down into the basement and the used stuff back up. I mowed the lawn and trimmed the overgrown bushes. Just before I moved to college, we went shopping for a microwave for my freshman dorm room, and I asked which was your favorite color. You picked the white one, and back in your kitchen, I unboxed and pronounced it yours. It was your first one, which you then used daily to warm up your mid-morning coffee, long after the pot had cooled.

I left for college without the microwave but with money for my freshman year, some of which I spent on my own Southern Comfort. We reunited at family gatherings, knowing one another a little better because we had lived together. When I finished my freshman year, we decided the previous summer had gone so well that I moved back in for another three months. I started my own painting company, and I made better money. Knowing I owed you more than lawn care and a small appliance for rent, I painted your house. After work and on weekends, I washed, scraped, and primed the siding, then covered the 1970s sea green with a lovely light blue that you selected from my professional paint portfolio. I finished the job just before I returned to my sophomore year.

By the time I needed a place to live the next summer, my parents had also moved back to Milwaukee, and I lived with them. We continued to see one another at holidays, and I called once in a while to see what you were up to. We fell back into our familiar rhythm — you telling me about your soaps and the news headlines you found interesting, me now talking about the Film Noir movies I thought you may have seen and the Spanish literature I was reading. You didn’t always understand what I was talking about, but you listened just as attentively as you did when you babysat me when I was sick as a child.

Those conversations continued for several years, and you seemed ageless, as only grandmas can do. But everything changed the day you fell down the basement stairs, landing in that very room where I had slept. Severely injured, you could no longer live alone. Mom moved you from your little blue house into an even smaller and far bluer room in a nursing home. I visited occasionally, and when I departed for a year backpacking around South America, I stopped by to say “Hi” and “Adios.” I told you what I had planned for the year ahead, but you didn’t really get it; you could no longer track what I was saying, much less the countries I hoped to visit.

I had just finished a week-long trek in Patagonia when I got mom’s email that you had died. In her note, she told me about your last days, the funeral, and burial plans. I immediately called home, 7,000 miles north, mentally juggling logistics, time, and money to return for the service. She reassured me I didn’t have to come home for this; “You already did so much,” she said. “You lived with her, called her, visited her while she was alive. There’s no need to be here now that she’s gone.” I toasted you with a glass of Chilean Malbec—I couldn’t find any Southern Comfort. Then I hiked up a massive glacier, down into a cool valley, and into a wild alpine forest. As I walked, I told you about the bright blue of the ice, just like the color you chose for your house, and about the goofy penguin families I’d seen in Argentina—you would have loved their soap opera antics. I could almost hear your laugh, just like when we joked around in your backyard. And I felt good about that too.

© 2025 Josh Feyen

Josh Feyen was raised on a farm in southwest Wisconsin, went to college in Milwaukee, lived abroad for four years on three continents, and now finds himself with stories to tell. In the middle of 2021, Josh set about writing 50 short memoir stories in his 50th year. Today, the main focus of Josh’s 50 in 50 writing journey is to share what he’s learned with his four teenage nieces and nephew. Josh lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Find his other blog posts for True Stories Well Told here.