LJ Idol 10: Break Week Home Game**
My grandmother is standing next to me, looking down at her own grave.
She is pointing to the filigreed bronze lawn marker embedded into the ground. Her birth date on the left, under her own name in block letters, across from the blank space to be filled in; the words Beloved Mother beneath it all.
It doesn’t say Beloved Mother and Grandmother because she’d had it made up ten years ago before the oldest of her beloved stepsons had his children. Six years before she and I were reunited.
I read the stone again and start to slip through time and space as I have done before, existing at all times, feeling all things at once; a vaguely psychic awareness, or maybe just a symptom of a melancholy disposition.
We are here to visit my great grandmother who is interred two spots over. I miss her so much, my grandmother says and I touch her arm gently.
The warm southern winter breeze blows through the low hanging palms.
Some unknowable but surely inevitable future is reaching back to me from a day when I will be standing here and missing both of them.
My grandmother motions again, this time to the grave above her final resting place to tell me that this man never has flowers. They grow up, move away, never make the trip out, she explains.
Again time and space contracts around me. I make a promise to myself to make the journey back to this place when the time comes wherever my tumbleweed life leads.
I take a final look at the stone before we turn to walk back toward the car.
I feel her then, the specter of days yet to be, a thought form who will be born on the day that the blank space is filled in but for a moment I see her clearly, she is holding the hand of a lover; they are just passing through town.
This future incarnation looks younger that I would wish for her to be keeping our vow but then I’m constantly told I look nearly ten years younger then my actual age. I take after my grandmother. She never admits her age but her birth year is engraved in my memory now. I look over at her, dyed red spiky hair and meticulously applied makeup. The woman whose example has saved my life more than she knows.
The car pulls onto the paved road and the early afternoon sun spills over the dashboard. When I catch my own reflection in the passenger side-view mirror I close my eyes until we are back on the highway.
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Inspired by the therealljidol break week topic: A possum ran over my grave.
Based on a roadtrip I went on with my grandmother yesterday,
I couldn't resist posting it even though I had decided not to enter the break week challenge.
**reposted becasue I totally acidentally deleted the orginal!