To Glenna, For Mabel

I can see my grandmother now, in her kitchen.

Married at twenty-seven, she stayed there for seventy-one years.

From there she fed us with her wisdom, and her pickles and her bowls of strawberries.

She was always there.

Silhouetted against the window with two taps,

The sweet water from the cistern for washing with and the well water,

So strong you could taste it through the Kool-Aid. It turned brown in the sunlight. My sister and I woke at 5:30 in the morning, then 5:00

But she was already there reading her Bible.

She smiled at us and asked what we’d like for breakfast.

We never could beat grandma at her own game.

So we sat at the metal table with the pink Formica top in the metal chairs with the brown vinyl cushions and ate whatever we wanted.

She had everything.

In her kitchen we watched all the daisies we could pick soak up dye and turn unnatural shades of blue and orange and green.

We learned to make raspberry pie and jam and we colored outlined pictures with broken crayons from the ten pound coffee can.

She kept them all.

Three people, ten people, fifty people camped around her yard in tents,

Kids cocooned in rows.

The dishes always done, the table loaded down with food three times a day, Sometimes overflowing into the dining room,

All of it made by hand and mostly by hers.

The fish we caught, the blueberries we picked, they were all grist to her mill.

We watched her pickle the beans and the carrots, carefully cut and stacked for the fair. She won it five times in a row.

She was an artist.

My father always joked that he gained ten pounds on every visit, he was a slender man and he loved her, she saved him.

In the hospital she told my mother she was ready to go home. I knew she didn’t mean her house because she and I had talked about it years before.

I guess you know where.

I went to visit her, but she was already gone from her kitchen when I arrived. Even then she kept giving for days, long past the time when

Everyone had left for good.