Places We Sat

For Florence, 93 years on Earth, 39 as my grandmother...

Unforgiving hardwood chairs on Cramer Street, softened by crocheted pillows, eating corn flakes with bananas and powdered doughnuts. Hours of Friday mornings spent together huddled around a kitchen table over mugs of freshly-brewed coffee and Friday afternoons hovering over Benji’s corned beef sharing laughs and life.

On Oakland Avenue, long, richly-stained benches and high-backed chairs crowded around a table shrouded in white linen, covered by plates of fried fish and beer-battered onion rings. Your plate neat, your portions small, in stark contrast to the smile upon your face, beaming more brightly with each small voice’s request for more.

Around the dining room table, gathered to give thanks, watch football,and overindulge on food and family. Well, I sat, so proud I had made the adult table. Your chair was infamously empty as you made quick trip after quick trip to the kitchen - "More rutabaga?" - to keep our plates full and our celebration seamless.

The cushioned seat of a movie theater, only one row up so as not to navigate stairs in the dark. A soda in one hand, my hand in your other. Garrison Keillor’s characters on the big screen. Then, the metal and plastic chairs at Pop’s, sharing a strawberry schaum torte and swapping stories.

Flowered, upholstered chairs - gathered for any number of events: Easters, Christmases, baptisms, birthdays, 4th of July, Packer games. Sitting to my right, soaking in the sustenance that a family together provides every bit as much as the feasts before you. Laughing at the antics of your sophomoric grandchildren, even when the joke was lost in translation.

Those same cushioned kitchen chairs from Cramer, now in a small apartment, occupied by great-grandchildren building you a gingerbread train with frosting and gumdrops. Your kind words and sincere interest praising and inspiring them. Their youth, your legacy, burning brightly and renewing you, if only for a few hours at a time.

At your side. Bruises and broken bones and tubes and a cavalcade of specialists and doctors and nurses. Despite some dark days, you pulled through and worked your way back home, back to your comfortable chair. Your effort, your legacy, burning brightly and renewing me, if only for the rest of my days.

And today. A long pew filled with family and friends, remembering a long life lived well. Me, unaccustomed to your absence, sitting here in sorrow. You, sitting with your husband. Sitting with your son. Sitting in my heart. Smiling at me, knowing that my grief is temporary, because you’re saving a seat for me in heaven.

© 2010, Jeff Wilson