Dreaming of Warm Sunshine

Travelling home on the tube on Tuesday evening something reminded me of a back yard I used to play in as an older kid: nine or ten years old, playing with my friend Bree while her mom 'babysat' us. Bree was always a lot of fun and we made the back yard our playground even though it was mostly dust and fallen plums in the shadow of eucalyptus trees.

Catching Flies

Being with Bree, even catching flies was fun.

More than fun, it became an afternoon's mission:

holding her plastic atrium poised, we waited

for the right moment to strike, the other of us grasping

the purple lid that would ultimately secure the flies

in their new four-walled, see-through world.

The fact that her back yard--a softly sloping hill,

dust we kicked up and hundreds of fallen plums--

vibrated with little winged creatures didn't really bother us.

My memory, even then, tinted the scene in sepia--

tones of eucalyptus trees and childhood--

and her hair glinted gold down the length of her back.

She held me in wonder, even catching flies.

Grams

Today, my great-grandmother would have been 101.

For the last four days or so, I have been thinking of Grams, missing her, wearing the cross she bequeathed me--a cross she received on her 50th wedding anniversary from my great-grandfather, Gramps. I was one month old at their party and there is a square, tinted photograph of me swaddled in her arms and my great-grandfather looking on: their first great-granddaughter.

The necklace is a gold cross with inlay black onyx and a tiny pearl set just in the middle. I've worn it to special occasions since she passed in January 2009--weddings, rehearsal dinners, nice dinners out--but the last few weeks I've been wearing it when I thought of her, to work, during the day. I find it difficult, intellectually, to wear a religious symbol with so much weight to it--that's how I hold it in my mind anyway--but I find comfort in the closeness of her spirit.

Grams was also a Sagittarius and there are certain things during the holiday season that inevitably remind me of her: singing in the choir; wrapping presents with neat corners (she taught me the right way to wrap them in 6th grade when I used to come over and wrap her grab bag gifts...); and her wise tip of the "Deary-to-Deary" present, a necessary shopping purchase in the run-up to Christmas.

I had the extreme fortune of knowing 5 great-grandparents in my life, all on my father's side. Almost none was more complex or familiar than my relationship with Grams: I was the little girl who didn't want to be a "little girl" and the one who came after-school to help her around the house in junior high. While we weren't explicit in my relationship with Alex, her approval that she liked her meant very much.

The last time I saw her, she was asleep in bed and I woke her to say goodbye: I was leaving to move to England. She smiled at me, at Alex, and I knew she would be done with this world soon enough. She had had her run and now it was time to be reunited with all those that had gone before her. She was ready.

Happy Birthday, Grams. We're thinking of you.