Grandma Gaden Sousa

Grandma

Gaden Sousa

The boy watched his grandmother work. She was a frail old thing. Prone to coughing and head spins. She wasn’t one of those grandmothers who went out on long walks or went swimming in the ocean. No. She watched soap operas from her homeland to remind her of her language. When something outrageous happened, you could hear her call out ‘Aye!’ or ‘No!’ or something that translated roughly to ‘What a silly man/woman!’ She watched those stories, and she cooked and cared for her family and guests. She read a little here and there, her impossibly magnified glasses never quite falling off her nose despite looking like they might. Today she fixed a button.

There are things you don’t understand when you are a child. That people existed before you, for instance, is something you don’t grasp until you’re older. Much older. However, the boy could sense the history in his grandmother’s hands. They seemed shrivelled, old, tired from years of work; work that would never have occurred to the boy. Work in the fields when she was twelve, work in the limestone homes of Portugal all day every day, the work to come here to Australia, the work of raising children, her work in clothing factories. All these memories lived in his grandmother’s hands. Hands that shouldn’t move like they did with the button. Alive. Young.

The boy thought it a cruel joke that his grandmother could leap into action as if it were thirty years ago to mend some cloth or hem some pants, but not walk outside without wobbling. Strangely, the body doesn’t forget these things. While her skin had become loose and her bones had begun to stiffen, they never forgot how to work. How to mend. How to stitch, cross, and fix. There was a youthfulness that came into her that filled the boy with joy. To see life flowing through her small, hunched frame, pouring out through her bony hands as they swiftly swung the silver needle.

The boy realised: there is nothing like a grandmother’s love. For they have seen so much, lived so long. In worlds completely different to your own. If you’re lucky, they tell you stories about a time before this, before you, before the boy and the button. They don’t care who you are, just that you exist. That’s enough to love you. That love has always been there, though the boy didn’t see it till now, with the button. It was there in the beginning when she leapt out from behind brick walls to surprise him in kindergarten. There in the dirt between his toes and the sweet smell of tomato vines in the garden patch at her old house. The love was in every bit of chicken, never-quite-salted-enough, as she served another meal for the family. Or every dollar she ever gave him ‘For a treat’. And finally, now, in the button.

It was enough to make his heart smile. Sometimes on dark days, when things seem hard and grim, when it looks like there is no escape, you might find it useful to think of the grandmother and her button. Sometimes that’s all there is to love, to life, passing secrets down in movement and in mending.