December 10, 1997

Grammie Flossie died today.  My mother called me just as I called her.  Kim answered when I called the hospital.  The Little Drummer Boy was the only sound apart from ours.  All I could muster: I love you Grammie, very much.  Her trembling exhale, I can only hope, in recognition.

I have missed her for awhile now.

All of us waiting, I so far away for years.  Then the news her heart was calm and her rings removed.  Tildy says he should–he would give them to my mother.  These tangible motions of closure.  They made me sad.

And I remember cracking acorns, down from giant trees along the sidewalk.  What was with that?  It’s all I ever wanted during my visits as a little girl.  To stomp acorns with my grandmother.

I remember her damn teeth, clacking and jangling, tea cups, and scrambled eggs on toast.  All hers, only mine to hear in the gloaming of the morning.  To love.  Peach sweaters and pearls, all so tiny.  How tiny her frame must have been then–all wrapped in white sheets, toes dainty lumps.  I hear her hair was gray and her face was not olive, only pale.  All I know is pretty shoes walking with mine.

“You were my first Granddaughter!”  and I would sit in Granddadda Wes’s bear-skinned rocking chair trying not to prick myself with the skeleton puffer fish.  “Let’s walk to the Bayshore.”  Oh, let’s walk along the Bayshore.  And all those stories, I asked to hear over and again, laying between her and Aunt Louise–Picking blueberries with her brothers till the hornets came; elder siblings wiping the rouge from her cheeks–how it mortified her.  All those stories had to be true–Lord knows they were the same every time. And the first picture I ever saw of her youth, too young to realize a grandma could be young.  Beautiful–hair up–on the bow of a canoe somewhere in a river up North.

And I know of my mother loving her mother.  She would call to listen–respond to each whimsy.  Bought her pink satin slippers, just for her to have even if not for walking.

And I know it is not a tragedy.  Flossie led a full life.  Graceful funny, sharp, and lovely.

There are a few things I have still to say Grammie.  You would have loved Patrick, and I am so happy!  I want to snuggle in your bed–like school girls you’d say–(of course, I was a school girl) and laugh about my smitten glances, my tumbling into love.

I’m sorry you were sick for so long.  You are my childhood, so much of me goes on without you–broken.  I still think that the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead was never quite as nice as me, and I was never that naughty, and thanks for teaching me to give insulin shots to rotten oranges . . . that should come in handy?

But I am not grieving for that.  I grieve for the Spanish moss always hung, silver-green webs from those giant trees.  For they will not have your step to cradle from above any more.  I grieve for lace curtains which do not drape glowing–yellow teardrop shadows with you away.  I grieve for the Bayshore–its sad absence of our hands entwined traveling its wall.

I believe in our lives we pass many things, none of which continues untouched.  I grieve for all those who will not be moved by you.  I grieve for them, and me–and us–who have lost a graceful wind, and whose edges now go unstirred. forever still, right where you touched them.

I have missed you for awhile Grammie.  But I will go on, broken parts of me–as we humans do, continue and remember.

Know that you existed.  Bright and small and very close to me.

by Shannon N. B. Powers