My grandma is one hip lady. Over the past year and some odd weeks since the genesis of this site I have written a little bit about her, and a little bit about her and I, and a little bit about her and my grandfather. You can read those stories here, here, here, and here.
My grandma routinely makes me laugh. She’s feisty, her comments and stories as unpredictable as road closures during this, the annual Spokane Summer Road Construction-Palooza. She’s emotional, passionate, obsessed with keeping her living spaces clean and her windows streak-free. She’s loyal and frank, and stronger than any woman I’ve ever met. So strong that she sometimes seems hard, and self-reliant, pushy, and difficult to understand.
So strong and stubborn that sometimes it’s easy to miss that when no one is looking she feels alone and overwhelmed. When no one is looking sometimes she hates that wheelchair, and that her husband can’t talk to her the way he used to, and that sometimes it isn’t enough that she has learned to move for the both of them. When no one is looking she is terrified of leaving the house for any amount of time because she knows something could happen and she doesn’t want to miss a moment, she doesn’t want to not be there.
My grandma’s life can be difficult, is certainly atypical, but is also certainly uniquely blessed. Mostly, I am blessed to know her. To have the opportunity to recognize her as not just my grandma — not just a cardboard cut-out of a person who is more of symbolic statue in my life than an actual living, breathing, vice-loving, joke-telling individual — but as a complex, beautiful woman, with hopes and dreams and fears of her own. To have the opportunity to know and watch a woman who has truly mastered the art of love in action.
Happy 7-oh grandma.
Thank you for every day being one of my biggest fans, for all of the bikes when I was a kid and for all of the honesty now that I’m grown, and for the endless supply of OtterPops, and the endless supply of sarcastic comments, and for the endless supply of onery-ness which you passed down to every single member of our family.
Love all of that. Love all of you.
I posted a picture of him for a silly Instagram-related game and found him waiting for me in my dreams, something which occurs so rarely it still explodes solidly-constructed dams inside me each time I see his face, mustached and smiling at mine just the way he always did, just the way I always remember him. As usual he didn’t say much, not anything I could hear or remember, but he was there and I knew it, and when I → Read more...
I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.
I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity → Read more...
[Alternately titled: Story, The Second: The Girl Who Moved To Washington State]
It began simply. A direct message on Twitter first, followed by texts; those texts, in turn, begat plans. With those plans came anxiety and apprehension – I didn’t know you, not your face or your voice or anything else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to – but also something exciting, a strange and unexpected hope hovering quietly on the horizon. And then we met, conversed and laughed → Read more...
Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.
Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.
I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?
(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)
(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in → Read more...