looking after me

My mother recently posted something about her Grandpa Woodard, whom I have very few memories of. One of these memories was during his last years, when he was suffering from his cancer. My Great Grandma Woodard sat next to him in his easy chair and fed him, because his hands were too shaky and he could no longer feed himself.  His words were very hard to understand, and he would struggle to answer a question or make a comment on what he saw…but I remember something very clearly. He turned to me from his easy chair and looked me in the eye. He was shaking a lot and I couldn’t understand what he was saying to me. I swear I distinctly remember my Great Grandma telling me what his mumbled and trembling words were trying to say. He told me he loves me. I have another memory of him holding me up on his shoulders when I was really little, when my mom, dad, sister, and great grandma and grandpa went out for a day together. He was tall and strong, and bold. 

This made me wonder: how many people do we all have watching us now? I am not a particularly religious person, but I believe that those who love us and have passed on know us still. Our ancestors, both recent and far back, could be rooting for us now.

I think of my Grandma Nina, who made me pink play-doh and took me to her flower shop, The Starving Artist. I can still smell the carnations. Is she familiar with me and my life now?

How about my uncle Mike, who died years before I was born… and my dad’s grandparents, Great Grandma and Grandpa Shelton? Are they sitting up there, Great Grandma wearing her moo-moo, facial stubble and all? I wonder if she remembers the time we picked raspberries in her front yard when I was tiny…I do.  I remember their ashy pot-bellied stove in the middle of their living room.

The other day I was walking my dogs around the block. It was hot and I could feel the warmth of the sidewalk through my shoes as I walked. I thought about how, one year after Lincoln died, I wrote a letter on a yellow balloon and released it into the sky. I watched it get carried away by the wind, miles away, and then it disappeared. The next day, I was in the car on my way home, and five or six houses down from my house and across the street, there was the same yellow balloon, writing and all, laying on the neighbor’s driveway. I was too shocked to pick it up. I went up to my room and couldn’t sleep that whole night. It seemed so strange to me that the balloon was carried away high and West, to the point where it was only a tiny speck in the sky…and then gone…yet it came back to my street, to my sight. Every so often I breathe a heavy sigh and wonder if Lincoln is watching, and if on his seat in Heaven he flips through the channels of his loved ones’ lives and sees through our eyes. 

 

Hmph.