A Place To Call Home

It really bugged me when it rained on the day Granny was buried. Rain just came pouring down first thing that morning and kept on falling all through the funeral. The cemetery had been all muddy and messy. And it just wasn't right for a lady who kept things as neat as Granny to have to be put in the ground on such a nasty day. Her trailer might have been old and beat-up on the outside, but the inside was always good and clean.

Granny's was the only trailer in town where the kitchen floor was so shiny that folks always thought it was wet. They would stop dead at the door and say, "Oh, Ms. Nellie, I see you just mopped. And I almost walked right in there on your wet floor."

Granny would smile and try to act humble, but inside she was beaming. "Ah, that floor looks a mess," she would say. "I don't think I've mopped it in weeks," knowing she'd just slapped a whole bottle of Mop&Glo on it the night before.

Mud now covered her shiny floor because of all the people going in and out, bringing us food for the next few days, until somebody decided who would take us in. When Mama died we already knew Granny would take us. But when Mama died it didn't come as a surprise like with Granny. The doctors had given Mama a time limit.

I'd be scared if I knew how much time I had left. But Mama wasn't. She faced death like David faced Goliath. Instead of moping around worrying about how she could keep on living, Mama spent her last days soaking up every little piece of sunshine she had left.

Mama had a strange disease with a name nobody could pronounce. I think the doctors just made up something and put syndrome on the end, because they didn't know what it was. So they sent Mama home and told her she had six months to live.

They were wrong. She only lived three.

Some people said she had cancer. Other people, like some of my crazy cousins, said that Daddy had had her fixed. They say he went to see a witch doctor and had her put a hex on Mama. I didn't know what a hex was until my cousin Marco told me it was voodoo. He said that all Daddy had to do was take some of Mama's hair to that witch doctor, and she could make a doll that looked just like Mama. And whatever the witch doctor did to the doll, it would happen to Mama. He said the witch doctor could make Mama as sick as she wanted, or even kill her.

I don't know if it was true. But I do know that when Mama got sick, she went down fast. And the doctors never knew what to do. They just sent her home with an expiration date, like she was a jug of milk.

Copyright, Linda Jackson 2011.