Springs creaking, Granddad’s maroon Ford jounces down our long dirt driveway. 
Washouts make for a rough ride, but that doesn’t stop Granddad. Here he comes selling Watkins products. 
His trembling hands pull a glass bottle of vanilla flavoring from a box, and whether it needs shaking or not, it gets all shook up. Its destination? Mom’s pound cakes. 
That was half a century ago. Granddad grew cotton and ran a country store. Toward the end he sold Watkins products back when door-to-door salesmen were welcome. 
You’d have thought he was a Kennedy with his square jaw and thick shock of hair. Women liked Granddad and he liked them. One day that would lead Grandmom to break a window to retrieve the family Bible from her burning home. 
As for Granddad, the day before a stroke killed him, I stood by his bed, trying to decipher his unintelligible speech. I made out one word: Imelda, his baby daughter. 
I bring my pen to this family tale because Watkins miraculous vanilla flavoring helped Granddad work his way back from a long family rift that Death buried at last. 
Aside from the rift, 2 memories surface of Granddad Cleborn. The first involves a boyhood crystal radio I made. I held the earpiece out and a trembling hand slowly raised it to his ear. Music played and a smile broke out. He handed me a dollar. It might as well have been a $100 bill.
The other is his penchant for nicknaming folks. He had 5 daughters and 4 sons. 
Over the years suitors called on the girls. One gent, bug-eyed like Rodney Dangerfield and hard of hearing, wore 2 large, cork-like hearing aids. Into Granddad’s sandy yard he would drive to call on daughter Priscilla. Granddad would watch him step from his car and warily cast his bug eyes about. “Cilla, old Stopper Head is here,” exulted Granddad. 
During that rift, Granddad wrote a fiery letter to Dad who was bald by eighteen: “Dear Persimmon Head.” Later, Dad began wearing toupees. 
To this day I smell Granddad’s vanilla flavoring and Mom’s cakes. My heart tells me that Watkins Vanilla Extract gave Mom an excuse to know her dad again. 
After she broke the ice a few other children thawed. Then that stroke killed him in a scene reminiscent of the Exorcist. One son refused to attend his funeral, and so I smell, too, the charred ruins of family homes. 
I still grieve over the heartbreak that followed. I’d tell you more but I just can’t. All these years later this tale of betrayal is dead man’s talk. I can tell you this: More and more I understand how life truly goes down. We are actors with secrets just passing through and only memories fasten us to what once was really true. 
Things change. Granddad’s been dead 31 years. Were Mom alive, she’d have to get Watkins Vanilla Extract Flavoring at Walmart. It’s in a cheap plastic bottle now. 
My parents’ home sits empty, bereft of fragrances of vanilla flavoring and hot, moist pound cakes. 
Many people have passed through. I recall those who’ve died and all they endured in this beautiful but seductive, secretive world. Memories alone connect me to the truth.