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Shop, where I was very well behaved and communed with nature. Mother said I had a grower’s heart. Nana said it takes one to know one.
    I’ve read the journal on each birthday since, and I don’t think it was possible to have been more loved. Mother was always laughing; that’s my best memory of her. Everyone remembered her laugh. She could turn it on Dad and make him not as serious. She’d surprise us with candlelight dinners, and the house seemed to glow in the light of her love. Nana said Mother sometimes hid behind the laughing, afraid of the serious person underneath. Nana wasn’t being critical when she said it, I just know what she meant. I don’t laugh and joke near as much as Mother did, but I hide sometimes, too. I still have an ache when I think about her; Nana said that’s real natural.
    I was in gym class when Mother died. We were running laps around the field when Miss Carroll, the school nurse, took me out of class. She said my aunt and grandmother needed to see me, but her face said it was more than that. I shoved down fear as we walked down the old hall that had seemed friendly just minutes before. Aunt Peg and Nana were waiting for me in the principal’s office, their faces caved in under a deepsadness. Miss Carroll left quietly, and Nana told me Mother had got hit by a car crossing the street in front of Redmont’s Florist Shop. I asked when I could see her, and Aunt Peg started crying bad. I was crying, too, and Nana picked me up with her full strength and said that wasn’t going to happen.
    I remember the tears after that and the absolute deadness. We rode to Nana’s in Aunt Peg’s new Buick. I didn’t believe Mother could be gone, but I was crying like I did. People were already gathering to share our loss. It was really the loss of the whole town, that’s what Mannie Plummer said. Dad was crumpled and broken. He lifted me up to his giant chest and we cried for days and days.
    The funeral came and went like a blur. Everyone said how sorry they were. Everyone asked if I wanted something to eat. The minister said Mother was “one of the finest lights God had ever made.” Richard gave me his very best baseball. Nana saw I’d had enough and drove me to a hidden field outside of town that was filled with wildflowers. We put together the biggest bouquet you’d ever seen. Nana said she’d always be there for me, no matter what. She has been, too.
    Richard refused to go back to school until I did. When we finally went back, a few kids avoided me, like death was something you could catch. My real friends were there, though, and they stuck to my side, helping me without knowing it to push toward normal. Once I wrote about living without my mother. I said life seemed gray and small—like watching black-and-white TV when you’re used to big-screen color. Dad put my story in a box in his closet where he keeps his special things.
    Memories were part of me, but Nana taught menot to live in them. We’re forever a part of the people who love us, she said. That kind of love is always alive.
    Nana is God’s gift to me. She is unmovable on being your own person and had a lot of practice standing tall on that one, since Grandpa nearly lost the farm four times because he was too stubborn to admit his mistakes. So she had to step in and remind him who he was and who he wasn’t.
    “You’re a farmer, Willard,” she’d say, “not an accountant. If God meant you to be good at numbers, you’d be good at numbers, but for now we’ve got that crop to bring in, and if you say we don’t have the money to do it, then we’re just going to have to sell the piano, that’s all.”
    Nana sold the piano four times and always bought it back when times were good. Grandpa never got an accountant till the day he died. He got a calculator, though, but never believed it could really add.
    Pumpkin growing wasn’t something that Nana knew much about, but she learned it real quick when I showed an interest. Like