Jayme

When four days had passed and the dirt mound of my grandmother's grave had almost flattened to the grass that covered my grandfather's,   we sat in her living room and read aloud her possessions as she saw fit to share them. I curled into the worn, woven couch and waited as my mother was matched with soft, civil war silver. Listened as the sturdy dining table where my grandmother would place the applesauce next to my seat was sent to my uncle, so his son could carry it down through the family name. I was fifteen that afternoon my grandmother gave her last gifts. I expected child things, toys tokens of the way she saw me, not the wedding rings she wore for more than half a century. When the words were read, I ran found the jewelry box on her dresser. and pulled the tarnished white gold from the velvet rungs. That whole night I twisted the diamond chips to snap slivers of light and filled y soul with the knowing that she saw me as a woman ready to wear such gifts. Today I took out her rings form my chest of treasure troves. I slid the dainty bands onto my pinky after admiring the way fifty years of marriage had worn them thin as paper. I imagined the decades of laundry, dishes, canning cooking, gardening, bandaging knees that flexed her finger around these rings. Hold the cold, thin metal I felt the years of laughing, fighting, trusting, praying, touching, loving she did in these bands. Today I finally understood why she left me these particular rings. It wasn't because she'd caught some glimpse of the woman within me. My grandmother was giving to me   a wish, a prayer a belief that I, too would know fifty years of being in love, of changing diapers, of scrubbing dishes, of praying in pews of holding on to the same hand of the same man I married until the day finally came that not even soil could fit between us.