Susan looked at the items on the mantelpiece through two sets of eyes. One was appraising and the other sentimental. Before quitting work for sixteen years to raise her kids, she had worked for a well-known antiques dealer in Houston who had appeared on Antiques Roadshow several times. Under his tutelage she had learned all about the price that certain items could bring due to their inherent value or the value that they held for collectors, mitigated by factors such as rarity and condition. By those standards, the items she now examined held little interest. The fact that every item on the shelf was procured and curated by her beloved grandmother, who had passed away the week before, made them priceless.
As a little girl, Susan’s parents had dropped her off at Mamaw’s house every summer for three weeks. It was the 1970s and they needed the time to “find themselves.” They ultimately found themselves divorced from one another and Susan appreciated the respites at her grandparents’ farm because there was never a voice raised in anger there. Mamaw was very religious. Not that she wandered around quoting the Bible chapter and verse, but in the sense that she never let anyone in her presence go cold or hungry or lonely.
Mamaw’s kindness extended to animals as well. Every evening she brought the day’s food scraps out to the small colony of feral cats who kept the premises rodent-free. She hung a feeder just outside the kitchen window so that she could watch the hummingbirds as she did her chores. Other feeders, hung strategically in the magnolia trees in her back yard, attracted her favorite bird of all – the red cardinal. She always eschewed flashy clothes, saying that if God had wanted her to flaunt herself, he would have made her a cardinal.
Even so, she had been a beautiful woman. She had married her husband, Murphy, when she was only fifteen years old before he left for the South Pacific. She gave birth to Susan’s dad only a year later, a real-life doll for her to play with. And now that little girl, and the grandmother she had become, was gone.
Susan was back in Northern California, teasing her belongings apart from those of her soon-to-be ex-husband. She opened a cardboard box and found the small collection of tchotchkes that she had taken from Mamaw’s mantelpiece. She opened the box and the smell of her grandmother’s house wafted out gently. She unwrapped a knockoff Hummel piece that was shaped like a rabbit and touched the smooth surface to her tear-streaked cheek. A noise outside the sliding glass window broke her reminiscence and she turned to look outside. Perched on the fence, visible between two of the vertical blinds, was a red cardinal.
Literature in Small Doses 