Our theme for the month of October is “flash nonfiction.” Writers were asked to submit pieces that were 250 words or less.
Every time I talk to my grandmother on the phone, we begin the same way. I dial their home number and she answers with “Hello?” and I say “Hi Grandma, it’s Katie,” and she says, “Well, hi, honey!”
We talk about gardening sometimes. When I was little, she had rows and rows of sugar snap peas, and she’d drag me out back to help pick them. I remember being darkly impressed when she pulled bugs off her plants and crushed them between her fingernails. She grew squash, too—so many, she says, that she’d put them in a wheelbarrow at the end of the gravel drive with a sign marked “Free.”
We talk about Ann Arbor sometimes. It was her home once, too—she worked a few years at the Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital. She had my uncle there in September 1959; by November, she says, they were taking him to Michigan football games tucked inside my grandfather’s wool-lined winter coat.
We talk about time—well, we do, and we don’t. She tells me about funerals she’s attended or missed. Her sister. My grandfather’s best friend since kindergarten. Sometimes she tells me about growing up afraid of polio, about missing the last day of school picnic because her family was in quarantine. She tells me the ways life is so short and the ways it is very long, the way things change and the way they stay the same.
And then we say “I love you” before we say “goodbye.”
Katie is a doctoral student in English and education at the University of Michigan. She loves the New York Times crossword puzzle, advice columns, oceans, and dogs of all kinds.
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I love how this gives the feeling of one conversation and three hundred conversations all at once. I don’t have any living grandparents anymore, so this piece is a lovely taste of those grandparent-grandchild chats and all they can be.