Slippery Words

She stands on the gravel in a pair of synthetic leather flats the same brown color as the chocolate candies I would find frozen in the big freezer in her back room. The skin on her legs is smooth with fewer imperfections than the skin on her arms. I’ve learned that’s always the case with farmers, long pants protect legs and skin that rarely meets sun.

Her skirt is flat blue and tucked into it is a floral button-down blouse. She is opening the back passenger door of the red car that she and my grandfather had for ages. I hated to ride in it because the fabric covering the back seat was fuzzy, dry rotted, and prickled my legs.

Her tight perm frames a face that is not smiling, one that is caught in a moment of ordinary action. Come to think of it, why am I always smiling?

I like that I can see the barn in the background because it was red then and not covered in the white sheet tin it is today.

Even the little building with the green shingles was still there. I can feel the wooden benches on its north side beneath my fingertips and how they were filthy but polished shiny by decades of contact with oil-covered tractor parts.

This is my favorite picture of my grandmother. It reminds me who she was before the skin wrinkled on her legs and of all those years that I could unfailingly find the old red car parked in her driveway. It reminds me that these moments of ordinary action are the most truthful ones.

I wish I was behind the camera in that moment and could ask her in a moment of ordinary action if she did everything that she wanted to do with her time living. I would ask her what it feels like to decide right and to decide wrong and why I am so scared of freedom.

I would ask her what it’s like to be on the downhill side of life and what to do about the feeling of bubbling stomach acid I have when faced with a decision that could shape my time living.

I want to ask her all of these things because I know she would have a simple answer. I like simple answers. She would not give me a mouthful of slippery words that I would pick through to piece together what I needed but the truth of how things are and how they were for her.

My grandmother did not use slippery words like I do. She did not layer them over her eyes and on her lips so she would not be truly seen by the people she was talking to. She did not wear them over her skin like floral blouses and pleated skirts, but I do.

I do not admire those voices who echo slippery words like the song of a mocking bird but I admire my grandmother with every fiber of my being. I admire her enough to take every slippery word I own and light them each on fire.

This would be a very big fire, the kind that cracks, pops, and emits black smoke.

I would write notes of fear and freedom and bubbling stomach acid. I would toss them all into the fire of slippery words but I would keep the one about freedom and pin it to the wall right under the picture of my grandmother and beside the note that reads, this is my turn.

I guess I didn’t tell you that this picture hangs on a wall in my office and is accompanied by my favorite words of hers. You didn’t know this because I was too busy offering you slippery words.

I hope that someday I am an old woman whose leg skin has reached the point of wrinkling and I hope that I can answer the above questions with words that are smooth and strong and the least bit slippery.

I hope that I look back on my time living and can confidently tell you I have taken my turn.

Because one day long after I am dead the people I have left in this life will think about me and I pray that I have left them with plenty of photos of me not smiling and so many simple words that they can grab onto.