I took the home economics class, and shop, and literature classes. In the first days, despite her sore hip, she and I circled each other around the kitchen, making slow, subtle round motions, like hawks slowly spiraling on a billowy sky, while she watched to see how much salt I threw into a recipe, if I stirred enough or too little, if I forgot to let dough rise a second time. Great-gram, sit down, I would tell her. But some old folks are feisty, and my great-grandmother was five years from one hundred that summer. When they get to be that age, I think the people who still want to stand up after a blow like a broken hip will keep standing up no matter what, and the people who only want to sit, sit down and die.
Broken hips separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
My great-grandmother was all wheat. It was hot in that room with the heal rising into it and the midwestern humidity pressing against everything. At night I put my sheet on the hardwood floor, which was cool where I lay for a moment or so until my sticky body warmed it up. I spent hot sleepless nights moving around on the floor, following the coolness, or leaning my forehead up against the screen on the window, hoping for motion in the sky, waiting for the heat to crack open and spill out thunder and lightning and rain. I d brought aside and passed the time studying those pictures, considering my great-grandfather s face, standing bare and sweaty before the wavy old wardrobe mirror comparing my face to his.