Seventy-One
She remembers seven years ago like it was this afternoon.
She can still see him falling, vessels in his head screaming at him, screaming at her, in a single moment eradicating his ability to stand on legs once strong and lean.
She sat outside on the patio after opening gifts and told Chris and I stories both familiar and foreign. I knew the one about the intitial aneurysm, and the subsequent strokes. I knew they had spent Thanksgiving until three days before Christmas in ICU. I remember visiting, the stale smell, squeezing his hand, him squeezing mine. I remember the grandfather of a good high school friend of mine occupying a room only two doors down from where my family sat, huddled around the bed of the man we all were sure was invincible.
My grandpa was always the strong silent type. 6’2” and able to fix anything. Like the time he helped me build a catapult for a class project (my tennis ball flew the furthest). Or the time he rebuilt my car from scratch after it had been totalled my senior year in high school.
He was always speaking with actions where most used words. We never anticipated his ability to speak would disappear one moment when we weren’t ready, before we had memorized the last syllable spoke to each of us.
She still looks at him as if she just fell in love with him yesterday. And when she tells us stories about life before the wheelchair, I see her eyes gleam. I watch her remember herself in his arms, the two of them two-stepping their way across raising four kids, owning a house, traveling, spoiling eight grandbabies. But her eyes, they still gleam for him. And over the past seven years they have created a new language together. Without her, he is almost impossible to understand. Without her, he is less alive.
She remembers her last syllable from him. She remembers that he told her he loved her. Everyday she lives with an “I love you” seven years old, still ringing in her ears.
And so every year when this day dawns, when it comes time to celebrate her birthday, she celebrates his.
Babycarrot sister and gramps.
Story, The First: The Pug Who Moved To California
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...
Found
This week I’ve been finding pieces of writing long lost and forgotten. Unearthing words belonging to me, and words penned by some of my favorite of all literary voices, collected and saved and scrawled excitedly on pages littered with foggy memories of past lives, obscured now in light of all that was and is and is to come.
Of the words not belonging to me, Lucille Clifton’s were the ones I found most often, recounted in notebook after notebook, or inked → Read more...
Shari-Romancing A Stone
They say water changes stone, carving it over time to angles and dimensions in harmony with water’s need to reach the sea; but sometimes, stones change the watercourse instead.
-The lovely and eclectic Shari
On Hoarding
I’m collecting my favorite corners, like the one with the stunning oak tree on display for an entire neighborhood to see, its limbs shading a bustling crosswalk shooting confidence into pedestrians like electric currents of white light, fresh graffiti on a nearby curb: an infinity symbol, black and simple.
I’m collecting stories about the apartment window filled with small elephant figurines along one of my favorite walking routes. So many trunks standing side-by-side and none of them alive.
I’m collecting the surprisingly → Read more...