Memories

Grandma taught me to drive in the church parking lot when I was fifteen and Dad had given up. She never raised her voice, not once, not even when I took out the trash cans. She just said "again" and we did it again. She said that's how you teach anything. Love you, Grandma.

We moved to the street in 2009 and knew nobody. Peggy was on our porch within the hour with a rhubarb pie and a full report on which neighbors were worth knowing. She was eighty-one when she stopped shoveling our walk in the winter, and only because we begged her to. Rest well, Peggy. Two o'clock is very quiet now.

Thirty years in the classroom next to hers. Every afternoon at two o'clock I'd hear her doing the wolf's voice through the wall, and every afternoon I'd have to stop what I was saying because my own class had gone quiet listening to her. I never got a single thing done at two o'clock. I wouldn't trade it.

I was seven and I couldn't read and I had decided I was stupid. Mrs. Holloway kept me after class for twenty minutes every day for a month and never once made it feel like punishment. She told me my brain just needed a different door. I have a doctorate now. I have told this story at three different graduations. She came to one of them.

Mom's kitchen table had a permanent flour handprint on the underside of it, near the left corner, where she'd brace herself while rolling out dough. We found it when we cleared out the house. Nobody wanted to wipe it off. Rest easy, Mom. The table is in Dana's kitchen now, and the handprint is still there.