The sky's as blue as the coffee's strong, it's true

Goooooood morning.  It's interesting [cannot decide if I see it as a good or bad thing], no matter what time I go to bed, 11, 1am, or 4am, I almost always wake up before 9.  In a way I appreciate it because I don't feel like I have wasted a portion of my day...but, at the same time, I know I probably need more sleep.  And speaking of sleep and not having it, I had intense insomnia a few nights ago.  It was muggy, hot, gross, in my bedroom.  Opening the windows did nothing.  I don't own a fan [yet] and it just wasn't happening.  Anyway, for some reason my grandma popped into my mind and wouldn't leave.  My mother's mother...Irma (such an adorable, classic grandma name, right?).  I am not close to her at all, as she lives in WI and rarely get to see her.  But there she was, in my head that night.  She has Alzheimer's now.  I am finally at an age where I would love to visit her and rack her brain about life in the early 20th century (she's almost 90), how she fell in love with my grandpa, what it was like being pregnant nine times, how she was as a young adult, etc., but it's all gone.  Anyway, at 3am I was thinking about all of that and this is what came out:

Hush, Memory

speaks

in the palpable  heaviness

of my bedroom tonight.  This heat

is something I had forgotten

until now.  How it calls

out to the secret crevasses

of my subconscious.  No breeze

to sweep away what

I had planned on saving

for next season.

[and then the next].

And somehow she's here,

stagnant in my mind, as if

the sap-like air cushions not

only my history, but now

the questions marks

of my grandmother's.

I roll to my my side

and she says, hush.

I'm listening now

to the memories I've fabricated

of her youth.  Unraveling

a sweater 

that never was. Composing

elaborate stories

in a lazy effort to understand the

narratives that course

through my being.  My blood

whispers tales of ancestors

I know too well.

In the stickiness 

of this sleepless night 

[this sudden, impossible, pool of thought]

my throat locks, I see

my tiny grandmother, a woman

whom I never truly knew, the woman

whom my mother calls mom,

and I reach my arm out--

toward center of this

all too quiet room.  

But things fall

apart, and

maybe

I am hoping

that her memories

can be lassoed, retrieved,

re-membered.  Years, decades

of a life washed away

and replaced with blank 

expressions and white waiting

rooms.  X in the appropriate squares.  

I'm going to tell you 

five things,

now,

when I return, repeat

them back to me

in the same

order.

Cactus, mouse, hammer, spring, and pen.

Did you take your pills?

Have you had breakfast?

Do you want to go for a car ride?

Maybe this will work...

Don't strip away her dignity, please.

She was there

when I was born.  Rosebud lips,

she said.  What we share.  These lips

are possibly all that we'll ever know

we share.  But even those

are fading into the marks

of events past.  Her voice now rests

within the severe parentheses 

of shelved laughter, evaporating

frowns.

It's too much, this

heat wrapping around me.

Nothing moves.  Thoughts come

and loiter, hovering in the molasses

of the night.  Oozing, each waiting

for its turn.

************************************

I would write more, but the morning wants me to be outside.  Will write more tomorrow. Have lots to share.

************************************

Etymology for the day:

hug
1567, hugge "to embrace," perhaps from O.N. hugga "to comfort," from hugr "courage, mood," from P.Gmc. *hugjan, related to O.E. hycgan "to think, consider," Goth. hugs "mind, soul, thought." Other have noted the similarity in some senses to Ger. hegen "to foster, cherish," originally "to enclose with a hedge." The noun was originally (1617) a hold in wrestling.