My grandmother, an old country girl and a tough woman, lived in a high-rise condo with a decent view of the green dumpster. She saved everything. One year, she kept my gift of Christmas poinsettias alive well into August, until the stalks had grown woody and the flowers felt like pummeled leather. Each time I came to visit, I knew it was time to leave when the pantry was empty. She would buy a carload of groceries for me before I arrived, tubs of chicken salad with halved red grapes and wedges of Monterey Jack and Thousand Island dressing in opaque jars, the consistency of cream. When I bid her goodbye, biting my inside lip like a true stoic to keep from crying, she would press two wax-paper candies, which she kept cold and hard as pebbles in the freezer, into my damp hand. 

Last year, my grandmother got two new kittens. She named them after plants, Sungold and Carmello, but I couldn't visit her, or them, or anyone else for that matter; I had to stay home and watch the leaves grow and fall from the elms in my backyard. My grandmother always planned ahead. She had already bought the chicken salad with halved red grapes and Monterey Jack cheese and Thousand Island dressing for me. The kittens would mewl day and night for their mother, so my grandmother fed the kittens my food, the cream and butter and fat forming a crust around their snouts.

I never learned to mourn anything; it wasn't a subject taught in school. Those poor kittens. It makes me sad to think about them, so I won't say anything else.

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