Sylvia

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We were driving down the winding Catawba mountain road in quiet western Virginia. Crimson, sienna, and brown leaves. They were an airborne maelstrom of beauty, furiously and soundlessly in meandering flight towards the ground. Country music punctuated the ethereal moment; real country, that is. The kind that Charlie Daniels himself grew up listening to. I thought it was pretty, I thought that everything was pretty, and I told my grandmother all of this. I started describing my thoughts on the leaves, and she told me I should be a poet. I told her some jokes, and she told me I should be a comedian. She radiated everything beautiful. She told me “God is Love and Love is God,” and I loved her such that I thought she must be a goddess. I got a little older. She smoked a pack a day. I played my Super Nintendo and she watched me play. She still radiated in the same way, though. I was Aeneas and she was Venus. She made me macaroni and cheese and she encouraged me. “Michael Alan, you can do anything in this world you set your mind to,” she would say. No one else in my life would treat me this way, at least not for many years. The importance of the simple peace and affirmation I experienced with my grandmother was uniquely magnified by the fact that I was home schooled. With a limited catalog of corroded influences, who would tell me in bite-sized advice how I could only be successful as a doctor or a lawyer, her one emanative voice in the back of my mind spoke volumes.
When she
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and never got back up
...........I couldn't cry
because goddesses never die