The Tower

Everyone has felt nostalgic. It can be for the good and the bad parts of your life, nostalgia has a way of making them feel the same in the end. My grandmother was a tough woman, I am more like her than my mother. For a long time I believed because I am not kind and selfless like my mother than my father’s anger is one of the many traits I have acquired without ever really knowing the man. I have his eyes and the same sloping nose, but it was not from my father in which I gathered my anger but from my grandmother. When she died it was not her kindness or laughter that I remembered but the sting of her rough hand on my cheek. I am too forgiving, quick to forget what has been done to me to as to assuage the unpleasentness of an apology. I cannot apologize therefore I never expect one from others, this I cannot blame solely on my grandmother but more a familial trait passed along generations. Taking a hit is nothing new to me, but missing someone who has made you feel that embarrasment, that is new to me. It wasn’t all bad, I had it easy, that is what everyone tells me anyway. The good parts, the rainy day in which I was stuck inside with three other children while my grandmother peeled potatoes, the tapping of rain against the window soothing all of us, even her. I asked her if I could try, at first it was no, it was always a no, I was too slow and there was never enough time. My mother pleaded my case, I will teach her, she says like it is simple, the act of learning. While my mother did try, her hands encompasing mine, the knife gliding over the potato skin like it had all of the time in the world. Even with my mother’s hands over mine my eyes still followed my grandmothers, hurried and unmiskable, the same hands that gripped my arms like claws, the same hands that I felt across my stinging cheek, were now performing yet another familiar, inconsequential task, that of which she has performed a hundred times over. I did not know her, not her favorite color or even her birthday but I knew her hands and I knew her anger. Nostalgia makes me miss it, her anger, it made mine seem tame, bearable.