Writing a set of poems about my Grandma J, I've been surprised to find myself sad. I've grown to think of her as a particularly bright spot in my life--a woman so very different from myself and yet so happy to share her life with me and others. I am a careful, pastelly kind of person. She was vivid--feisty, even--vocal and quick to laugh. She seemed so much more interested in doing things than in fretting over them, and I never saw perfectionism's fist prints in her kingdom. While she made beautiful quilts and feasts and jellies, they had a kind of easy exuberance rather than strained precision. She and Grandpa lived a love story to the end. Their picture rests on my desk--an elderly couple plunked on the couch, holding hands and laughing into the camera--a symbol of some kind of unbridled joy. Hot cocoa in a V8 world. Something that doesn't sting.

So I am surprised at this sadness, and at this tardy welling of tears that didn't surface when my grandparents died four years ago. I wanted to remember Grandma in all her colors, and to joy over her with the eloquence that only comes to me when I've found a tender distance from former heart-wrenchings. I do not know if I will finish the poems, but I hope to.