A Tribute to the Memory of Mrs. Barbara

It didn't matter that she was approaching ninety and I ten. Some of my earliest summer memories were made at Mrs. Barbara's house. Almost every day during the summer, when my mom was bedridden with illness and my siblings were occupied with the television, I would walk down the street to Mrs. Barbara's house, open her little white gate, and ring the doorbell. As I listened to the sound of her little cherub water fountain, through the warped glass windows, I would see Mrs. Barbara shuffle over with her fluffy white hair and slippers to open the door.

Some days we would go outside to the back porch and she would feed the baby deer from her hand, and other days we'd move to the well-loved floral couch and watch an episode of Little House on the Prairie on her tiny box TV. But usually we would just talk. We talked about everything. Given that it was so long ago, the memories of our conversations are surprisingly poignant to me. "Is heaven real?" "How can we know?" "What will it look like?" "What do you think Jesus looked like?" And with the never ending patience only the elderly possess, she would ponder every question with me. I was not a hyper child and had no qualms sitting for hours and listening to her ideas. She told me once that God didn't have the limits our imagination does, that there were colors He had created that we could never imagine, that He took only His favorite colors in heaven and put them on earth. She said that He might create something, and we would ask, "what is that?," and He would reply, "why, it's a bed," and we would say, "that's not a bed," but when He would invite us to lie down on it, we would find it the most comfortable bed of all the beds.

Those afternoons were draped in a yellow haze, perpetually tinted with sherbert and the delicate way one approaches fragile relics. She would always offer me her favorites of these trinkets of hers before I would leave, trying to find them a home for after she passed. an old lady passing down her wisdom and memories to a small child in her otherwise tedious, long, some might say, boring, days.

Before I moved at the end of second grade her health began to decline - something I never picked up on until looking back with hindsight. It was in this time she took my tiny hand in her wrinkled, liver-spotted one and told me with a solemnity I didn't understand that when she got to heaven she was going to plant a seed and as I grew, the seed too would grow into a tree. From this tree she was going to hang a little swing, and by the time I joined her in heaven it would be a huge tree, with branches that swooped all the way to the ground, and she would be fit and healthy enough again to push me on the swing.