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estrellami-1 · 2 years

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Yarn, Twix, and Crushed Ice

November 2012

I still remember the room. My grandmother is sitting on one side of a couch, closest to a lamp.

“Mima?” I ask timidly.

“Yes?” It sounds more like chess. Her accent is one of my favorite things in the whole wide world and my thirteen-year-old brain can’t comprehend how some people don’t understand her. For me it’s as natural as breathing.

“Can you teach me to crochet?”

She grins. “Of course, baby. Come here, sit.” She always calls me baby. That’s another of my favorite things. “Mira, mija. See?” The hook catches the yarn, over, under and through, and it looks like magic even when I have a hook in one hand and yarn in the other and mine is doing the same thing hers is.

Mine isn’t half as good, though.

My first project, which ends up being a doll’s blanket, is terribly wonky. I frown at the snake-like edges until Mima sighs, drops her own project in her lap, and plucks mine out of my hands. “Mira, mija. See the tension? And here there is no tension? You need the same tension, all the way through.”

“Okay,” I say, determined to get it right this time.

I don’t.

But I don’t stop trying.

The next project is passable as a square-ish shape of fabric.

Later that night, my mom—her daughter-in-law—mutters to me, complaining about the tasteless broccoli Mima had boiled.

I don’t care. I know the love and care that goes into the cooking Mima does; adding salt and pepper isn’t hard. Certainly not as hard as actually making dinner. I don’t answer, just go on helping to set the table. A silent rejection of my mother’s opinion.

Besides, I was in the kitchen with Mima as she was cooking. I was doing my best to learn how to cook, because I see the love that goes into every single meal she makes.

August 2013

It’s three weeks after her birthday, almost to the day. My fourteen-year-old brain can’t comprehend how she does not want to celebrate.

What we do instead is go to Walmart. She has a shopping list. Because of her honey-thick accent, we call it a chopping list. Half-teasing, half-acceptance, all love.

She’s driving the cart and I’m walking by her side. I’m amazed at how fast the seventy-something woman can walk; I’m almost struggling to stay by her side. I’m especially amazed at the stream of words coming out of her mouth, moving at the same pace we are.

“We need tomate sauce, por el—como se dice—spaghetti. Look, baby, there, see? No, there!” She huffs and stomps her foot when I take longer finding the cans than she likes, but when I look back with a sheepish smile and two jars of Ragú in my hands, she gives me an impish smile.

Our favorite part of the store is the sewing aisle. She gets fabric usually, and this time we bought fabric for me: pink, and white-with-colored-dots.

A few days later, we make me a set of pajamas.

We forget to wash the fabric, and the clothes shrink in the wash. Instead of pants, I now have capri pajama pants.

I wear them until I grow out of them, and even then I try to find a way to salvage some part of them.

June 2014

It’s my fifteenth birthday and Mima’s not here. She calls me that night, and practically before I can answer, she’s singing “Happy Birthday.”

“Gracias, Mima,” I laugh, and she continues on in Spanish, even though she knows thank you is pretty much the only Spanish word I know.

It’s okay. We both know each other, regardless of the language we’re speaking, and I’ll pace holes into the carpet for as long as she keeps talking. I just like listening to what she has to say.

February 2015

Mima doesn’t come visit at all this year; she’s visiting her other kids and grandkids instead. I don’t begrudge her that.

What I do instead is make my favorite meal. I call her and hope she’s somewhere near her phone, where she’ll hear it. “Hello?”

“Hola, Mima,” I laugh. “Are you busy?”

“Por tú? Nunca.”

“How do you make croquettes?”

“Ay!” She says, somehow making the two letters last for ten seconds. “Por real?”

I laugh again. She’s kind of predictable when it comes to this. “For real,” I agree. “I have the recipe card here, but this doesn’t seem right. Is it really only one pound of ground beef?”

“Ay, no,” she says. “One pound es only por Julia’s familia. You have too many people. Two pounds, dos, okay?”

“Okay,” I parrot. “So double everything?”

“Sí,” she agrees.

They’re delicious, if a little bland; she wrote the recipe just after she’d visited her daughter who can’t have salt, so she forgot to write it down.

It’s okay. We add the salt after and send a picture to Mima. She calls the next day saying how much she loves it.

April 2016

She doesn’t visit again this year. Again, it’s okay. She has three other families to divide her time between. We’ve kept her long enough.

This time I call her on my dad, her son’s, birthday. “Hi Mima, guess what,” I say.

“Qué?”

“I’m going to make Papa your lasagna.”

“Ay! His favorite?”

“Sí,” I agree. “I have the recipe card, but can you tell me? Just in case?” I don’t tell her the real reason: I love hearing her voice. I’m selfish, I wish I could live every day with her here. I understand I can’t, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

“Of course,” she agrees, like I know she will. We stay on the phone while I cook, even if we can barely hear each other at times. I shoo my father away from the kitchen a few times, the way Mima does when she’s here, and suddenly I feel like an adult: I’m doing things Mima always does.

May 2017

I call Mima a few weeks before the end of school. “Mima? I’m graduating this year.”

“Ay, Dios mío, sí. Cuándo?”

“The end of this month. Will you come?”

“Of course,” she answers, like I know she will.

She brings my aunt—her daughter—and her daughter’s daughter, my cousin.

We go to Cheddar’s for my post-graduation dinner. She gives me an obscene amount of money and I burst into tears in the middle of the restaurant. I don’t have the words, in English or Spanish, to tell her how generous she is, and how much I don’t feel deserving of this gift.

I think she knows anyways.

When we get home, she makes my dad go crush ice for her, since our ice crusher stopped working. She fills a cup with the shards and adds roughly an inch of water. She brings that and a small glass of white wine up to bed with her.

February 2018

Mima left a few months ago, so I do what I do when I miss her. I crochet.

I’m rather proud of my collection; it’s moved from a plastic Walmart bag to a big black duffel that’s almost half my size. I’ve got a rainbow’s worth of colors and then some, and all the hooks I could possibly need. I feel like a true crocheter, because I have a favorite hook. That feels like something a true crocheter would have.

I meet a friend a few weeks later to help her learn how to crochet, and she remarks on the bag, saying it looks like something I’d hide a body in. I agree and our thoughts run wild, but I do, eventually, teach her how to crochet. On my way home that day, I call Mima.

“Guess what I did,” I sing-song when she answers.

“Ay? Qué?”

“I taught one of my friends how to crochet.”

“Ay!” She says again. “Really? And she likes it?”

“She does,” I agree. “We’re going to try and meet up sometime soon again so we can keep working.” Privately, I wonder about joining or starting a group at my library, some place I can go and crochet with no expectations, no distractions. I know, if I did, Mima would join me every week.

November 2018

Thanksgiving happens with Mima and my mom’s dad, Grandpa. He’s from Argentina and sometimes I think he and Mima would’ve been a better fit than him and his first wife, my Nona, but I know better than to say anything.

He always gets her a bottle of sangria when they see each other. She never tells him she doesn’t like sangria. She takes it and pawns it off to us. I don’t know what my parents do with it.

Thanksgiving dinner is KFC, because Grandpa loves it, and we all eat way more than we should.

When we get back home, so late it’s almost the next morning, we all go our separate ways to our bedrooms.

I stay behind Mima the entire way up the stairs, helping her when she needs it, sitting down with her when she needs a break.

“Go to bed, baby,” she urges me. “I can do it.”

“I know,” I say, and don’t move. I’m made from the same stuff she is, and she knows asking again won’t do anything.

“Te amo,” she says, and I whisper it back as I help her stand up again.

We sit on the edge of her bed when we finally make it upstairs and talk long past when we should. She offers me a Twix bar from her repurposed cookie tin. I marvel at her age versus what she eats. She doesn’t make sense. I stop trying to quantify her and just appreciate the moment with her.

May 2019

She’s sick, my dad says, getting off the phone with his brother. We go visit her in Nashville as soon as we can, driving the thirteen hours straight through.

We get to my cousins’ house and my first thought is to see Mima, so that’s what I do as soon as I get through the family thronging the front door.

“Hola, Mima,” I say, and she looks positively overjoyed. I sit with her longer than any of my siblings, any of my cousins.

We go on a walk. I push her wheelchair.

We go out to Olive Garden. Our treat. I help her out of the car, push her wheelchair, read the menu and order.

She outeats my teenage brother. We all laugh, because that’s just like Mima, to tell Death not yet, and have Death listen to her.

Maybe it’s the nightly Twix.

She scoots backwards to the kitchen on a rolling office chair the next morning. My sister watches her get coffee and mouths “Seven!” to the rest of us.

“Sí,” Mima says scornfully. My sister jumps, and Mima frowns. “You think I don’t see you? I know how I need my coffee.”

“No, I know, Mima, but seven sugar cubes?”

“Sí! Es what I need!”

Our cousins don’t have an ice crusher, so they bought Mima a bag of crushed ice. She has a specific cup she uses to scoop the ice into her drinking cup. She loads everything up onto a tray and carefully scoots herself back down the hall to her bedroom.

I quietly decide I want to be just like her when I get old.

December 2020

“Feliz Navidad,” I sing as soon as the call connects.

She laughs and sings the next line. “Hola, baby. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas, Mima. Did you get my gift?”

“Sí, me encanta! Y tú? You got mine, yes?”

“Yes, Mima. You know you don’t have to send me money.” I’m pretty sure I’m the only one of her grandchildren who tells her that. I’m pretty sure it just makes her want to give me more. That’s not why I say it; I mean it. I don’t want her money, not if there’s something she could use it for instead.

She very conveniently doesn’t respond to that. Instead, she goes on about what the family she’s staying with got her. I hear the now-distinct sound of a Twix wrapper being opened and smile. I’m older than I was, but no less sure that Mima is secretly an immortal being.

June 2021

One day before my birthday. She’s in Nashville still. I’m pet-sitting at a friend’s.

I’m at work and just happen to check my phone when it feels like the entire world is a rug that got pulled out from under my feet. My heart and stomach do tandem somersaults and I land on my head. It’s a text from my mom to our family group chat, saying that Mima is sick. Doctors are giving her three weeks.

That was four hours ago.

Two hours later—two hours before I checked my phone—my mom texts again. The doctors were wrong. Mima has three days.

My parents fly up immediately. Another friend comes to stay with me, just in case I need to fly out the next day.

I get a text the next morning. 10:01am on my birthday. Hey kids, my dad says, so sorry to do it this way, but we understand that your aunt posted something to social media, so we wanted to let you know that Mima’s condition worsened SUPER quickly last night, and she went home to be with God around 10:30pm.

I very carefully don’t think about it. I very carefully don’t think about anything.

A day later my mom texts. A picture of a rosary, red elastic string, teal beads, a flower charm for the cross. We’re trying to figure out who made this. Was it you?

I lose it. Yeah, I text back, and collapse into tears, the dogs frantically licking my face.

A few days later my parents get back from Nashville. They brought presents. I got her crochet hooks, the ones she had when my dad was a kid. The ones she used to teach me, all those years ago.

I lose it again, this time in the quiet of my room. Only a teddy bear is there to simultaneously judge and comfort me.

January 2022

I find a voicemail from her, the last one, dated 2/15/21. “[Star], amore,” she says, and it’s the same voice I remember from 2012, 2014, 2015, and every day of my life. I hold back a dry sob. “I want to thank you por everything you sending to me, your heart of crochet—” my mind flashes back to a small, slightly-wonky, pink heart I crocheted for her. I sewed a button onto the middle of it because it reminded me of the crest in the Spanish flag. “—the picture of your bedroom and everything, pero I suppose you are very busy now so I may call you later on tomorrow. I love you, baby. Bye-bye.”

I don’t remember if she did end up calling me. I wish, with all my heart, that I could have just one more phone call with her.

I love you, too, Mima. Bye-bye.

#wrote this for a class #crazy to think it’s been a year and a half since she passed #somehow it still hurts just as much #sometimes even more #I still have the rosary #sometimes I wear it as a necklace #not very often though. I’m afraid it’ll break #writing #star writes #my grandma #love you mima #miss you #edited to take out my name

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hydrachea · 7 months

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I can't stop thinking about Blade saying gifts are unfamiliar.

And I can't stop thinking about Kafka and Silver Wolf, hearing that, and making it a mission to bring him gifts whenever they travel somewhere for their script - even if he's there with them. About the confusion in his eyes when they steal buy something and turn right around to hand it to him.

About his room starting out completely empty except for the bare minimum necessities, a few spare clothes and what he needs to take care his Shard Sword, but filling up with little trinkets and gifts over time. Clothes and jewelry and perfume from Kafka and posters, figures and plushies from Silver Wolf. About them also bringing food back, expensive specialties swiped from a restaurant and the weirdest option they could spot in a lone vending machine, a category of gifts that doesn't leave anything behind (except the photos they both take of the three of them eating together, or of the faces he makes when Silver Wolf manages to trick him into trying a suspicious snack while he's distracted with polishing his weapon).

About Kafka spending hours finding clothes and jewelry she thinks would suit him, because that's her love language. She gets him makeup too, refusing to let his good looks go to waste. She knows he can't put it on himself, they both do, and he doesn't care for his appearance enough otherwise - but he'll let her do his makeup for him anyway, because she enjoys it, and because he finds it soothing.

About Silver Wolf also buying him clothes, but the ones she gets aren't his style at all, and just barely his size. She gets them for him, but just so she can steal them right back - her love language is quality time, and she fills Blade's room with gifts she can borrow along with a moment of his day. It still counts as a gift, she insists, practically swimming in an oversized jacket she swiped from his closet.

About how in another life, Yingxing gave gifts to the people he loved and in this one, Blade receives them from those who love him.