The Burrow

I'm remembering a phone call with my mom, a few months after Bubba, her mother, died.  I'd been regaling G'ma with stories of her wonderful, beautiful, magnificently talented and brilliant grandson when I heard her sigh. G'ma was not one for deep sighs.  She wasn't the kind of mother who shared her sorrows with her children.  She was there for us; it never occurred to her that we should be there for her.  So, when I heard that aching exhale, I stopped chattering. The silence was powerful.  In a moment, one I am sure was shorter than it felt at the time, she collected herself and, with a rueful laugh, explained that, while my stories were wonderful, they also opened a hole in her heart.  "There is no one with whom I can share this," my mom told me.  "It will sound like bragging to anyone else."   Bragging.... the antithesis of her socialist upbringing... she couldn't make herself tell my aunt or a neighbor about her marvelous ...

Going into her apartment is like ripping off a bandaid, exposing the raw wound to the cold, fresh air once again. She's not in the blue recliner just inside the door, nor is the blue recliner just inside the door, anymore.  I pick up a fallen t-shirt and remember the cruise on which it originated.  I turn to remind her how much Daddooooo didn't want to go to Alaska, and how she prevailed in the end, and how he insisted that he'd had a terrible time, all the while regaling us with stories of ice floes and more food than you could shake a stick at.... and she's not there. She's inside my head in a way she wasn't when her body was still living down the road.  Why I could ignore her then but cannot now? Is her spirit that confused?  Is it stuck on a cactus thorn?  She just can't seem to leave me alone. I watched a young man with a bandaged foot maneuver the mobile shopping cart through the aisles at Target and I turn to laugh with her about the time she to...