Grandmother
She had dark hair, dark eyes, strong nose. Like my father, like my sister. In her youth she was spry and mobile. She rode motorcycles with her husband and posed for photos seen years later framed in colorless, dazed remembrance when clearing out her house. But I only remember her sitting or wobbling precipitously on her walker. Sitting in her home, her room padded with a mountain of her possessions. Dressers and miscellaneous clothes and makeup kits. A large thermos atop a night stand beset by a litany of pill bottles in various sizes. She pulled me near, hand in my hand. Her old skin a cellophane husk pulled too loose in some places and too tight in others. Over the fingers and knuckles like knobby roots. Mulberry veins so distended and raised it looked as though they were scarcely connected to her body, like a detachable apparatus of tubing that laid just on the surface of her arms. She wore thick makeup, a cosmetic disguise that rubbed blush on the bedspread and her purple blouse....