My Grandmother in Winter (Flash Fiction)

A classic plays on the white TV at the kitchen counter. She faces away because she’s seen this story. In spite of herself she stays beside it; constant sound and electric energy emoted. The bowl she ate soup and crackers from at noon with a pill dries beside the sink over a towel and its picture of a basket filled with wheat. She rests against the worn back of a high kitchen chair watching the snow, water frozen around dirt, rage against the openness. The window is larger than the empty dining room table and outside her friends change by season. The dear, the squirrel, the rare blue jay, the morning doves, the groundhog, and the bees keep watch over my grandmother. Doing her part she tosses ears of corn across the lawn and fills the miniature farmhouse with birdseed. And somehow, at her age, in the summer, she still pulls weeds from the garden. For now, her white Keds dangle above the heating vent in her quiet, clean ranch house. It is winter and she is lonely in her kitchen.