The View From Here

Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women and nonbinary writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation. 

For six years I wrote my grandmother a letter once a week. It began the summer before I left for college and ran all the way through the week she died.

I can’t say these letters were interesting. In fact, most of them said rather boring things like, “I’m torn between two different purses, but I’m not sure which one to buy. The red canvas one or the small leather one. The red one’s better for every day, but the black one’s glamorous. What do you think?” I wrote a lot about how cold it was in New Hampshire. How I’d keep a jar of Vaseline in my coat pocket so that when I arrived at my Virginia Woolf seminar I could smear a glob on each cheek and hope to salvage my face before spring.

From her perch in suburban Chicago, my grandmother must have understood the cold (better than the purse dilemma anyway), though she only ever wrote me back a handful of times. Once she included a newspaper clipping about a matchmaking festival in Ireland. This was just after I’d gone through a breakup. She wrote, “I hope you find a new home for your heart.” Being so few and far between, the notes she did write me were all the more precious and important, like the words of a psychic recounted over a long-distance phone call to warn me the future was fast approaching, and had I invested in snow tires yet? She would sign them, “My Best Love.” With Gramma Liz, you were never getting the second-rate stuff.

For a woman who adored her grandchildren, she also loved shooing us away. We’d fly up from Nashville to see her, gather around the armchair where she watched 60 Minutes, and talk her ear off until she’d declare, with a nervous shake in her voice, “Don’t you kids want some ice cream?” Pulling a 50 from under her sewing table, she beseeched us to leave her in peace. Gramma Liz was funny like that. She wanted to see us, but she also wanted to be left to her own devices, those devices mainly being needlepointing. Maybe that’s why she liked my letters so much. I could talk and she could listen and neither of us needed to leave our cozy chairs.

“I read some of your letters,” my father would say after a visit to Chicago. “I wish you’d write me every week.”

How could I explain? Writing Gramma Liz was unlike writing anybody else. A living diary, a confessional. She didn’t share her innermost thoughts, but she offered a soft place for mine to land. When I came out to her in the spring of my senior year, I wondered if she’d write back. Coming out is an exercise in geography. Who will rise to meet you and who will retreat? The letter came immediately. “As it turns out,” Gramma Liz wrote, “two of my very best friends are gay, have been together for over 15 years, and are happy as can be. I can only hope that you’ll be as lucky.”

She loved sand dollars and the color blue. Turtlenecks in the summer and Starbucks once a week, when she’d drive like a bat out of hell to the nearest branch for the biggest Frappuccino money could buy. When Gramma Liz died, rather than sweaters or coffee, my uncle had glass sand dollars made for each member of the family. Mine broke in two. A clean break, but I wonder what would have happened if it had shattered. I might have thrown it away. Instead, I glued the two halves back together, let it dry, and stuck it above my writing desk. It wasn’t until my cousin visited last year that I realized exactly what the sand dollar was.

“In the light, you can see the ashes,” my cousin said.

“What?”

“The little gray parts. Those are her ashes.”

My grandmother will never write me back again, but as she did in life, she will every now and then make herself known. I’ll look up from the paragraph I’m writing and find the sunlight filtering through her. I’ll imagine her telling me to stay warm. And, because life is so awfully short, to buy both purses.