Granny Frick
It is
curious, how death can articulate a distance that life, in its fragile hope,
can only intimate. For the living, there is tomorrow, next year, the
expectation, however tenuously constructed, of continuum. & now there is
only a stark rupture, an irrevocable goodbye. My grandmother is simply gone.
&
how strange too to sweep up this singular instance in generalizations. Granny
Frick, the 4’11” dynamo. Patient & purposive but with a kind of remove from
immediacy that allowed her to watch things unfurl under her commentaries. Her
ceramics, mutely painted, scattered about the house. The red hot candies stuck
to white paper. How we’d wait for her to say “well, sheeeit” & feel
perfectly at home only when she did. & her heart, so open & so full of
love.
When I
moved here, I remember sitting in my truck in the parking lot of some little
restaurant in Homer, getting a phone call from home. It was my thirtieth
birthday & my grandparents were with Mom & Dad. Everyone was concerned
about me, up here in Alaska, wandering afar, looking for something that I had
only found broken elsewhere. & then Granny got on the phone & said it
must just be the Cherokee in me & that she expected I’d just search until I
found it, matter of fact, simple as that. She always said she wanted to see
this place. If she did, I know she’d be tickled pink by it & serenely
appreciative of its beauty. I know too that she’d be so pleased to find me done
with my searching. I think about her when I think about how anchored &
rooted & in love I am with this place, how she seemed always to know that
I’d find it here, my heart.
So
Granny, wherever it is you wander now, I hope you’ll stop a little while &
see the dogs, or the fireweed blooming through into fall, or the alpenglow over
the range. I hope you’ll hear the Swainson’s thrush & white-crowned sparrow
& feel in their melodies a kinship. I hope you’ll know however you can that
up here, at least, at last, there’s a road that doesn’t open unto anything else
but home. & whatever the torsions of time, we’ll share it with you &
your memory as long as we both shall live.
Comments
Thx! ~sally