square of earth

Grandpa used to take out his guitar, and sing to us in Spanish. The strings were not tuned, and he crooned into the dusty air at the house on West Summit. There was the Spanish lady painting with the rose and the cleavage that peeked out between the red and black lace of her bodice. She looked on with deep, black eyes and Grandpa sang of amor y la vida. Sometimes he would come and sit on the plastic chair in the backyard and watch us play on the rusty playset that rattled when you swing, threatening to pull off of the ground. On hot days you had to slide down the metal slide with a towel, cotton shorts and barefeet. Sometimes, he would give us strips of wax paper that would send us sailing off the lip of the slide into the dirt and grass.
The pecan tree, ancient and wide, stood above the house and littered speckled nuts all over the back lawn. We used pickers--long metal sticks with a spiraled basket on the end. If you shoved it hard over a nut, it would squeeze through and lay in your basket. The sisters ran around the lawn carefully picking up pecans and puring the basket into an open H-E-B bag--souvenirs from West Summit. If you took a pecan and smashed it in a cracker, you could use your nails to dig into the sharp shell and pull out the meat. My mama told me that once when she was little, she sat on her porch on a Friday during Lent and ate the meat of a pecan only to stop with wide eyes at eating meat on a Friday during Lent--Catholic doctrine from the mouths of babes.
Grandpa had a small garden behind the garage. It was a square of earth jammed packed with rose bushes and irises, surrounded by a curtain of honeysuckle. With a warm, toothy smile Grandpa cut me the stem of a fat, purple iris with the caterpillar pollen crawling down the petals. If I was lucky, there were a few buds attached that would spread open a few days later while sitting in a glass on the counter of our kitchen.
The day I went to see him in the hospital, I was 15. It was his birthday. There was a cake, candles, and singing. All the siblings were there, but he was not awake. I started crying and I couldn't control the bad feeling that tightened in my stomach and stopped up my throat. His kidneys had failed and so his body was bloated and stretched. I can remember his hands and that they were fat and that I could probably pop them if I tried to touch them. I didn't want to look at him, he didn't look the same. At the funeral, Mama told me to go and politely look at the open casket and I refused and she made me and I made a vow that my shell of a body would never lie in a casket for everyone to look at. I will never be able to change the last image of my Grandpa--preserved and pinched. A relative sang a song, accompanied by a karaoke machine. The picture of Grandpa in his 20 something sailor suit smiled back and his ears stuck out.