She never complained, but the years were etched into her. They showed in the tiny lines fan-spreading from the corners of her eyes and in the way her hands, still steady, carried a faint tremor when she thought no one was watching. When she smiled, though, she lit up the room.
Her house sat on the outskirts of Tuloma, a little wooden place with peeling white paint, a sagging front porch, and a shallow set of steps where I used to sit listening to cicadas. She kept pots of flowers along the porch rail—petunias, geraniums, and her favorite yellow marigolds—and in the backyard she had a vegetable garden that somehow always produced more tomatoes, beans, and squash than one person could eat.
Inside, the first thing you noticed was the smell.
Freshly baked cookies cooling on old wire racks, the faint scent of antiseptic that clung to her clothes from all those years working in the hospital, and the warm, comforting smell of old wood that had soaked up decades of laughter and late-night conversations.
Every time I crossed that threshold, she pulled me into a tight hug, even after I’d shot up taller than her.
