When I went up to Portland, Oregon with Moya and Lucy to go to my high school reunion, we spent a good amount of time with my 96-year-old grandma Harriet who I adore. Here we are in Portland’s Washington Park:
Sometimes when she tells stories about some of her friends it’s not clear if the story happened in the near or distant past. She’s super sharp and she tells all stories about events in her life with fresh clarity and details as though it just happened. We were talking about her friends, most of whom who have passed on, and she mentioned a friend who had 11 children and one of the younger ones (3 or 4 years old) died in a horrifying accident. I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. The children were playing with cardboard boxes and the younger girl put her box out in the street and climbed in it and a car ran over her and she died and, as my grandma told it, her mother was quite shaken for a long time – it’s hard to watch over 11 children at once. That was more than 50 years ago. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to lose a child that way. It makes my stomach fall apart.
