Bonnie

I keep a pinecone on my desk. Its appearance is average in every way—brown, sharp, rotund. It’s scented like a Christmas Costco candle, pungent like a curled cinnamon stick up your nose. I stole it from the flower arrangement on my grandmother’s casket.

How did they know? How did the funeral directors know my grandmother bought an orange mesh bag of scented pinecones every year around Christmas? She always kept a pinecone at her desk to smell when she was stressed. Sitting on her depressed couch in the basement, I’d watch her fill her lungs like she was sniffing a drug. When the scent faded from one pinecone, she would grab another from the bag and replace it, going through all of them by the time Christmas came around again.

I was seventeen years old on the day of her funeral when I swiped the pinecone. I stared at her still face, then ran to the bathroom and cried until I threw up. What was wrong with me? Why was I so upset?

My grandma taught me to hate people with unnaturally dyed hair. People who drank caffeine. People who wore the circular peace sign, because she believed it was an anti-Christ symbol. She was overweight from a lifetime of bad habits developed after years of surviving an impoverished childhood, which is probably why she was also a hoarder. She lumbered around on swollen feet shoved into shabby Birkenstocks, and skin cancer scars pockmarked her arms and hands. She drowned her hair in copper red dye, holding onto her youth until her hair thinned and began to fall out. I helped wash her hair in the kitchen sink, taking care not to lose too many strands. She never wore makeup and always wore muumuus from JCPenney made with fabric inspired by the ‘80s.

She canceled Christmas because my dad and his siblings were fighting on Jesus’s birthday. She beat her children with the metal vacuum tube. She was a God-fearing woman, in that she actually feared Him. She forced this fear into her grandchildren. She pushed it down our throats until she pushed my cousins away from any desire to even look at a church building. When we disagreed, she would say, “Pray, and you’ll see it my way.”

She taught me about hate until I hated her. Why couldn’t I have a warm grandma—an ideal grandma—with gray hair and sugar cookies?

Because I was the eldest granddaughter with nothing to do over the summer, I was tasked with helping her move from the house my dad grew up in–a hoarder’s house–into the house where she would die. Every day all day for two weeks I was glued to her side, sorting through old, crusty things. I found to-do lists from the ’90s with tasks like Take Derek (my father) to the dentist. I helped her use her iPhone to take pictures of things she could not keep.  When I threw away an elementary school craft made by my forty-something-year-old uncle, I dried her tears and held her like she was my child.

While rifling through a keepsake chest, we discovered something that had belonged to her mother. When my grandma and her siblings were born, their mother chose a song for each of them and as part of their bedtime routine, in 1950s rural Idaho, my great grandma would rock her children one by one, singing each their own song. Grandma and I found the sheet music of her childhood song: “Mighty ‘Lak a Rose.”

I’m not sure why–maybe I was curious, or maybe I wanted to understand her better–but I started sight-singing. Tears flooded her eyes again, but this time I was crying too, and I finished the song through choked breaths.

Lookin’ at {her grammy} with eyes so shiny blue,

Make you think that heaven is comin’ close to you.

Grandma did some things right. She made birthdays special with go-karts and tea parties and pancakes shaped like smiley faces. We picked strawberries and read her mother’s journal. When out driving, roundabouts became carousels as she circled them over and over again until I couldn’t stop laughing.

Now, I can see how I was influenced by my aunts, uncles, and parents who whispered at family gatherings.

Oh my goodness, Bonnie. You can’t say that anymore.

Your grandmother is an interesting lady. Don’t listen to her.

Mom, I’m going to raise my children how I raise them. You’re not the parent.

If my adults had kept quiet, could I have had the gray-haired, sugar cookie grandma? If I tried to love a little more…? Had I ever really hated her? Or, had I taken on another person’s hatred for her, one they learned through years of her guilt trips and bricks thrown at boundaries?

Then, I alsoremember how she would stay up until the AMs of the night, stress-crocheting while watching the news. “Those gays are ruining the rainbow,” she told me. She believed if Biden became president, it would signal the collapse of America as we knew it. She bought silver during the election of 2020 to prepare for certain economic ruin if “Joe” took office.

As we said goodbye at the end of each family gathering, she forced a kiss on our cheeks. It was always swamp-wet or desert-dry, never in-between. She didn’t care if I didn’t want one. If I somehow avoided her and left without one, I would get a lecture the next time I saw her. “I’ll be dead one morning,” she’d say, “and you’ll be glad you got one last kiss.”

The first part turned out to be true. She died of an unexpected heart attack seventeen days after President Biden’s inauguration. The second part did not turn out to be true. I am not glad for that one last kiss, nor the many kisses before that.

But, I keep that pinecone on my desk.