Red

Peanut Butter m&ms

            She would only give us five.  Or six.   No more than seven.  After a lunch of cheese spread sandwiches and a glass of 2% milk, she would walk around the table with an old Skippy peanut butter container filled with peanut butter m&ms.  She kept the container on the left side of her lazy Susan.  We all knew where it was.  After lunch we would hold open our hands, as if waiting for communion, for her to fill with our favorite-colored candies.  There were blue ones and red ones and yellow ones and orange and brown.  She would dip her hand into the container, pulling out handfuls of rainbow m&m’s, dropping a few of each color into the palms of our hands.

The red ones were my favorite.  Mostly because red reminds me of her.  Reminds me of how each red m&m could stain the inside of my hands, making them blush like roses and raspberries, making me think of her throughout the rest of my day. 

“Who has some m&ms?”  She says as she wraps her arms around each of us, tickling her fingers lightly under our chins.  Behind our ears.  Against our necks.  Making us giggle, making us laugh, making us squirm.  

“I think you do,” she whispers into Tiffany’s ear. 

“And you do,” she whispers into Chad’s ear. 

“And you.  Do you have some too?”  She whispers into my ear.  Her nose kissing the side of my face, nudging into my ear, whisking away at my blond curls. “I think you have some too,” she rocks me back and forth; trying to make me open my hands full of red and blue and brown m&ms.  All I can do is laugh.  My hands squeeze tighter around the candies.  I do not want to lose them.  But we never do.  She never takes them from us. 

When I open my hands later they are stained a bruised red. 

They are stained the color of my grandmother.

Raspberries 

            The July sun hits my bare back and raspberry vines tear up my uncovered legs.  I wear only a mismatched bikini and a pair of old rain boots in the bramble of bushes.  I hold a blue quart sized container that is half full of raspberries and am softly singing a song to myself.  She comes to the edge of the patch and stands a few feet away from me.

“Hello my songbird,” she says to me.

“Hello my grandmother,” I say back.  Berries fall into our buckets.  Sweat drips down our foreheads, onto our shoulders, and down our backs. 

“You don’t have to stop singing just because I am here,” she says lifting a vine to pluck that one perfect berry from its leaf. 

“I know,” I say back.  “Why don’t we sing something together?” 

“Okay.  What do you want to sing?” She asks. 

For the next hour we sing shortened versions, or as many of the verses that we know of, “I’ll Fly Away” and “Amazing Grace” and “Wildwood Flower” and “Go to Sleepy Little Baby”.  We sing like the songbirds that rest in the trees.  We sing like angels.  We sing like the stars. 

After picking our containers full we begin the walk back up to the garden stand.  With each of us having only one hand free, I grab her hand with mine and we walk side by side.   The red dye of the raspberries we picked on our palms mixing together, swirling into one cosmos of red between our hands. 

I can feel it.  I can feel the heat; the warmth of the color red.  The scratch of blood.  The element of the heart.  The feather of a cardinal.  The petals of a rose.  The stain of an m&m.  A red peanut butter m&m. 

I can feel it all.  And I understand at that moment that this is the color of love.  The color I feel every time I think or see or sing with her. 

The color of my grandmother.  How glorious the color red can be.