Insomnia
I lie awake, long after the rest of my town is sleeping, watching the past like it's an old 8mm home movie being shown in my head. My little sister, who looked like a "Chatty Cathy" doll, just a few years ago, is now a granny. My mom, her black hair now blue, is a great grandmother.
I'm taken back to a time when I was a lad and my own great grandmother would come to visit. She was some kind of Cherokee or Chickasaw from Mingo County, down near the state line.
Somewhere, I have a discolored Polaroid photo of the hideous orange '54 Mercury Monterey she flew around in. Packed down with hand-made quilts and boxer shorts and cans of cocoa, she'd roll up in the yard like some kind of Santa Claus.
God love her, she'd pick me up with those gnarled old hands, her knuckles all chipped and scabbed from wrenching down at Tri-State Tractor and Saw, and hug me till I could scarcely breath. Who'd have thought that she'd been known as
"the meanest woman in Hancock County"?
Those same callused hands could whip up the best chocolate chip cookies, ever. She knew how much I liked them and would get up early to give them to me for breakfast. Mom wasn't crazy about that, but Grandma could soften her heart with a look and an Indian proverb about parole in West Virginia (I can't remember how it went).
Oh, and I'd sit on her lap in the rocker in the evening while she told me exciting stories of the family that no one else seemed to know: "Grandpap Siotus and That Woman", or, "Uncle Maynard and The Knights of the Invisible Empire". Then she'd sing to me while the ash lengthened on her hand-rolled smoke and finally fell on my neck like a searing fairy kiss.
The last time I saw Great Grandma I was 16 and visiting the kin of some kin's farm in Ohio. We youngsters in the pasture had a near miss with the tornado that dropped a brick through the windshield of her car, a '63 Mercury Monterey. Grandma's gone and that was the last time I was in that part of the country, so far, at least. If only we could know when is the last time, the last time we'll share a story or learn about haystacks from Cousin Thelma or have the chance to leave something unsaid.
