Topic Edit: Tears in America (11)

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Shifting my memory toward my paternal grandmother, I recall meeting her for the first time when she moved into our mountain-top house—the home we had left behind when we relocated to the marketplace.  She arrived with my youngest uncle, who is ten years older than I am, who used to take me to the skating track at the private elementary school where he worked.

My uncle lived with my grandmother until he joined the army.  Just before he left, he called me up to the mountain-top house and asked me to stay with her until he returned.  I agreed, even though I didn’t truly want to.  Still, when he left for the army, I moved back to the mountain-top house and began attending school from there.

Because the marketplace lay between the school and the mountain-top house, I stopped by my parents’ shop almost every day on my way home from school, slipping briefly back into the busy, familiar world we had moved to before climbing back up to the quieter, older world we had left behind.

My grandmother suffered from neuropathy throughout her body and often moaned in pain.  For a middle schooler, staying with her was difficult.  There wasn’t much we could do together, so I spent most of my time studying, the room filled with the sound of pages turning and her soft, involuntary groans.     After about ten months of living like that, I told her I wanted to return to my parents’ place.  She told me to go.  So I left, breaking the promise I had made to my uncle.

After that, I visited her occasionally.   Like my maternal grandmother, she passed away while I was studying in the United States—another loss that reached me from across an ocean, carried by distance and time.

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