Twenty-eight hundred miles away, my grandma is dying.
My mother's mom grew up in Kentucky, a state all green with pasture grasses and leafy trees, all white with crosses and steeples. I know nothing of her childhood but recall being told she'd never gone to school past the sixth grade. Yet I also remember her telling me she'd attended high school. I do not know how she felt about school, or what her favorite subject was, but I recall her careful cursive on the birthday cards she'd send with five dollar checks inside, and I imagine she earned high marks in handwriting. I know when she was grown up she worked for J.C. Penney, I think doing something with sewing. I know she birthed five children and lost her husband when a drunk boater slammed into his dinghy on a fishing trip, casting him overboard where his head struck a rock. I do not know whether he died from blood loss or from drowning. I was two or three years old and know him only through pictures of him holding my infant twin and me in his lap, his brown eyes--my mother's eyes--shining.
