The View from Here

For six years I wrote my grandmother a letter once a week. It began the summer before I left for college and ran all the way through the week she died. I can’t say these letters were interesting. In fact, most of them said rather boring things like, “I’m torn between two different purses, but I’m not sure which one to buy. The red canvas one or the small leather one. The red one’s better for every day, but the black one’s glamorous. What do you think?” I wrote a lot about how cold it was in New Hampshire. How I’d keep a jar of Vaseline in my coat pocket so that when I arrived at my Virginia Woolf seminar I could smear a glob on each cheek and hope to salvage my face before spring.

From her perch in suburban Chicago, my grandmother must have understood the cold (better than the purse dilemma anyways), though she only ever wrote me back a handful of times. Once it was a newspaper clipping about a matchmaking festival in Ireland. This was just after I’d gone through a break up. She wrote, “I hope you find a new home for your heart.” Being so few and far between, the notes she did write me were all the more precious and important, like the words of a psychic recounted over a long distance phone call to warn me the future was fast approaching and had I invested in snow tires yet? She would sign them, “My Best Love.” With Gramma Liz you were never getting the second rate stuff.

She loved sand dollars and the color blue. Turtlenecks in the summer and Starbucks once a week, when she’d drive like a bat out of hell to the nearest branch for the biggest Frappuccino money could buy. Rather than sweaters or coffee, when Gramma Liz died my uncle had glass sand dollars made for each member of the family. Mine broke in two. A clean break, but I wonder what would have happened if it had shattered. I might have thrown it away. Instead, I glued the two halves back together, let it dry, and stuck it above my writing desk. It wasn’t until my cousin visited a few weeks ago that I realized exactly what the sand dollar was.

“In the light, you can see the ashes,” my cousin said.

“What?”

“The little grey parts. Those are her ashes.”

My grandmother will never write me back again, but as she did in life, she will every now and then make herself known. I’ll look up from the paragraph I’m writing and find the sunlight filtering through her. I’ll imagine her telling me to stay warm. And, because life is so awfully short, to buy both purses.