The Artist's Way

letters from my grandmother. “The forsythia is starting and
this morning I saw my first robin.... The roses are holding
even in this heat.... The sumac has turned and that little
maple down by the mailbox.... My Christmas cactus is
getting ready....”
I followed my grandmother’s life like a long home movie:
a shot of this and a shot of that, spliced together with no
pattern that I could ever see. “Dad’s cough is getting
worse.... The little Shetland looks like she’ll drop her foal
early.... Joanne is back in the hospital at Anna.... We named
the new boxer Trixie and she likes to sleep in my cactus bed
—can you imagine?”
I could imagine. Her letters made that easy. Life through
grandma’s eyes was a series of small miracles: the wild tiger
lilies under the cottonwoods in June; the quick lizard
scooting under the gray river rock she admired for its satiny
finish. Her letters clocked the seasons of the year and her
life. She lived until she was eighty, and the letters came until
the very end. When she died, it was as suddenly as her
Christmas cactus: here today, gone tomorrow. She left
behind her letters and her husband of sixty-two years. Her
husband, my grandfather Daddy Howard, an elegant rascal
with a gambler’s smile and a loser’s luck, had made and lost
several fortunes, the last of them permanently. He drank
them away, gambled them away, tossed them away the way
she threw crumbs to her birds. He squandered life’s big
chances the way she savored the small ones. “That man,”
my mother would say.