Apricot Pineapple Jam
It was a sunny day in our little valley and my Grandma was gloriously manic. Together we packed off-brand Ziploc bags with soft sandwiches, apricot pineapple jam and peanut butter on Wonderbread, carrot sticks and apple slices. She threw in a few purple silk flowers for style and drove my older brother and me to our nearest park.
It was my first picnic. I was four years old and my blue eyes took in the slide, I swear it was a mile long back then, and shiny metal that baked in the hot sun. My Grandma laughed about something with my brother while smoking a cigarette — it was the 90s, after all.
I swung on the swings, my petite frame soaring through the summer breeze. There were other kids here but my brother wasn’t at my side so I tried to become invisible, playing as quietly as possible. I wore bright purple and pink bike shorts that rode high on my legs that would surely be scorched by the slide but my heart really longed to try it.
“Robin, come eat your lunch!” my Grandma called in her deep, smoke-addled voice. I wandered over and unwrapped my sandwich and though I was the pickiest of eaters, this particular combination was new to me and it tasted delicious.
“You haven’t gone down the slide yet,” she observed, and I shrugged, too nervous to express my heart’s desire.
“I’ll race you there!” my brother said, flying like he did around the bases at the Little League field where we spend most afternoons. He had already gone down the slide twice by the time I caught up.
The steps were metal and warped, and it seemed like they went on forever, transporting me into the blue cloudless sky. I sat down at the top, my soft calves and the backs of my thighs immediately burned by the shiny slide. And I let go, the downward fall enough to make my stomach drop and the wind rush through my golden curls. I screamed in delight and ran back up to do it again.
It was the first and last time we visited the park with the big slide with Grandma as her depression swung back in, followed by the mania that drove her to Texas where her lifelong smoking habit turned into lung cancer and she ended her life alone.
Other members of my family would try to push me, thinking that this type of motivation was what I needed to be molded into the upstanding Christian woman that they all assumed I would become. But my short, soft Grandmother with the crystals and canned grape juice, she was the only one who understood the simple act of sitting in silence with me while I worked up my nerve.
She left long before my life found its wings, before I had to tell my mother not to contact me again, before my own bout of mental illness would drive me to an overcast day in a bathtub with intentions and final words that were luckily anything but. She missed out on the birth of my son and my love affair with words, the dawn of my business and my discovery of new systems of belief.
I still think of her often, on warm summer days, when eating an apricot pineapple jam sandwich or in those moments when fear is on the verge of robbing me of something that I really want. I think of her, and just like back then, I let go and fall forward.
