So many excuses for not writing, so many conditions I insist on, like needing time and space.
My time has been taken by many things this summer; I no sooner got back from a long strange trip than my father was hospitalized which meant a lot of coming and going, duties and distractions, but he is now home and resettled into his own space, albeit with new conditions and expectations, the new normal.
My dad got so he was in a good enough place that I dared travel again, enjoying the restorative space of open water and woods, a camping/kayaking week with a dear friend. Two and a half days of travel each way and worth it, sharing the ride with my husband who camped out at the Oshkosh air and space show. While out and about we mostly masked and mostly maintained the space of a cow’s length between us and strangers but mostly wasn’t enough.
Somehow, somewhere, my husband got Covid and now I seem to have it and with it, time and space, so this week I managed these six sentences and a double Six below.
Holding Space by D. Avery
Dear Jamie,
You said you’ll want to hear all about my visit with my grandparents, well I’ll get started now, plus letter writing is a means of escape (haha, it’s not so bad, well maybe Grandmother is).
Grandmother is one of those people who has to fill any silence with a swarm of words, sharp words that whine and threaten like hovering mosquitoes. And she’s filled all the space in their house with stuff, all kinds of just stuff, and lots of it, any flat surface is taken up, leaving very little room for me, so I usually hang out with Gramps in his shed workshop.
Gramps says the house is taking on a precarious topography, tells me she wasn’t always like this, then he went on about (are you ready for this?) my mother’s older brother dying in a swimming accident at the age of eight, I never knew that my mother had a brother but she would have been four then and I was five when she died of an aneurysm, so yeah. And my dad, well you know how talkative he is, haha, but Gramps was full of information and insights, like how Grandmother decided to resent my dad for taking my mother away and how she has trouble having me around because I look like their son, my uncle. He said she doesn’t want to love anyone anymore because it hurts too much, but then he looked right at me and said, ‘We have to, August, we have to keep loving, even through loss and pain, don’t ever forget that.”
*
Dear Jamie,
Well, it’s another day, and since I never got your letter into the mailbox, I’ll just add on to it.
I was out with Gramps again in his workshop today and out of the blue, or maybe he was continuing yesterday’s conversation, he said how sorry he was for me losing my good friend Jimmy on top of already losing my mother. He said my dad was a good man but was himself still hurting, said that he’d hoped Grandmother could be a better grandmother to me, since I didn’t have a mother for these tough times.
That’s when I told him I was doing okay because I have a new friend (you) and that you have two mothers and his eyebrows went up and he kept filing his mower blade and I told him how Mimi and Momo can even get Dad laughing and talking, told him how it feels like a family since that Thanksgiving dinner. Then Gramps smiled and wondered if maybe Mimi and Momo could make space at their table for him and Grandmother too.
I know I didn’t make her sound very nice, but, what do you think?
Augie
Augie you may remember from long ago Sixes (and 99 word stories). I thought I was finished with him and his friend Jamie but, to my surprise, they reappeared and insisted on getting some air time. This is how it turned out.
This week’s SixSentenceStory prompt word is “space“. Thank you to Denise of GirlieOntheEdge for hosting. Entrust her and her merry band of Sixers with your own Six Sentence Story through the linkup and be sure to read and comment on the other Sixers’ Sixes.
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