Generational Gifts

I never knew my grandmother

she passed before I could even

tuck the image of her face

into the folds of my memory

the only photo I know of her 

is with my grandfather

blue eyes like 

melting glaciers

sunlight reflecting off of arctic snow

My father doesn’t like to talk about his mother

so I stole all of my mother’s memories

coveted them like glass marbles

clutched in the center my palm

Like how she was the kindest woman my mother knew

but had a big mouth

always stealing snippets of gossip during church

when she should’ve been paying attention to the sermon

she’d pass along the tidbits like illicit notes 

passed between friends during class

except it wasn’t just her friends

it was almost everyone

I have a journal of hers

stowed away in my bookshelf

it sits along all of the notebooks I’ve filled 

with my bubbly racing print.

The cover is light blue,

the sticker still on the front, the corners peeling now.

Only the first page is filled out. 

Written in her tight, and for me nearly illegible script

she says

I’m not sure what I really want to do or say with this journal, but I think I want it written down how much I love. My family, my church, just people. How I see the struggle and how much better it would be if we would just reach out for each other; Sometimes we are such foolish people. We take plights and hurts and disappointment and store them up in our hearts like a squirrel storing his nuts. 

My parents are storytellers. 

My father’s first dream was to be a comic book artist, 

and my mother spent most of quarantine 

planning out a novel 

that’s been sitting in her brain for over a decade.

But I have always been a poet.

I never understood where it came from

until that moment 

when I read my grandmother’s words for the first time.

This woman is now sitting beneath black earth

after a long and terrible battle with cancer

a drifting slow death that left my father

often unable to speak of her.

This woman is now long gone

and yet I feel her vividly in this journal. 

This loving woman with

dark black hair,

crow feet by her eyes,

short in stature and 

often who I blame for my lack of height.

This woman who I have never met 

is still able to reach out, 

place a warm hand along my cheek

and say during the hardest of times

I know.

She guides my own hand toward my pencil 

because she knows better than anyone

that during times like these 

we must write with abandon

throw graphite and ink to paper

let it smudge beneath our fingertip

let the paper ripple with our tears

because it is when we are feeling 

these things 

almost always too large

and too vast to convey with words

that we are truly human

and undoubtedly alive. 

And so we must always try, 

because this is how the lost

reach out for others to find them.

How people like me,

with fragile and unsure beginnings,

find out how it all started.

Simply with a word, 

written,

spoken,

and thought.