Freedom

Word Count 1,251

Freedom          

The crochet hook and bright pink yarn dropped from Elwanda's hand. She blinked in surprise Her fingers were usually sure on the hook. Still sitting in the battered old rocking chair, she leaned forward to catch the ball of yarn before Harley, the cat, spied it. Her old body was too slow.

         Harley pounced on the yarn and promptly rolled into the line of yarn attached to the granny square block Elwanda had been working on.

         “Brenna!” Elwanda shouted, knowing she could never unravel the cat from the yarn without destroying the almost completed block.

         Brenna stomped into the room. “What is it now, mother?”

         Elwanda felt herself cringe on the inside. Though she fought not to show the cringe outwardly.

         She feared that moving in with her daughter had been a mistake.

         “Can't be helped, she reminded herself. She had been so sick this year: first with a minor stroke, pleurisy,and finally a compression fracture in her upper spine. With Dean dead four years now, she had no other help. No choice, really, except to move in with Brenna.

         Though Brenna had offered her mother the empty second bedroom with private bath, she had done so out of duty to her eighty-year-old mother. There had been no real desire to have her mother live with her in that offer.

         Elwanda pointed to the cat who was happily batting the ball of yarn across the floor.

         “Really, mother,” Brenna scolded. “When you're through crocheting,You should put your crochet stuff in that basket I bought for you.”

         Elwanda hunched her shoulders and smiled in a gesture that instantly brought  Grandmother Morgan to  mind. “Wasn't finished,” she  sheepishly said. “It slipped from my hand.

         

“Perhaps you're tired,” Brenna suggested. “Want to watch TV? I'll set the tea kettle on to boil.

         Elwanda leaned back, pressing her aching back securely into the soft contours of the rocking chair. She might as well do as Brenna said, since she had nothing else to do now except wait.

         Sometimes, though, the waiting was so hard. She just wanted it to be over. She wanted all the pain and loneliness to be over and gone.

         Brenna returned with a tray loaded with two tea cups and a stack of crackers. Each cracker was topped with a spread of Brenna's Christmas cheese log.

         Elwanda smiled. She had taught all her girls how to make that cheese long one long ago Christmas . Only Brenna made it now. The other two girls didn't care for it. Just as they didn't care for the green tea Elwanda loved.

         Brenna sat the tray on the small table between their chairs. “I made hojica, your favorite,” she said as she reached to unhook the infuser from Elwanda's cup.

         “you like it too,” Elwanda prompted.

         Brenna smiled. “I've learned to like green tea since you moved in. I don't care for crochet, though.

         “your Daddy always said crochet was an old woman's fancy. He said I looked like an “old Grandma” when I sat in this chair and crocheted. He fussed at me every time I picked up t yarn and hook.

         Though the words might have seemed bitter to a younger person, there was a serene smile of pride on Elwanda's face.

         “But when Derek was born,” Elwanda continued, and I became a real Grandma, Dean shut up about  my fancy; said I could crochet all I wanted, now that I was a grandma.”

         “Daddy may have fussed about your hobby,” Brenna agreed, “But he was proud that you  always had an afghan to give to anyone who came to the store.

         “Remember when you won first prize in the crochet division at the South Plains Panhandle Fair? Daddy framed that ribbon and hung it in his office. He was as proud of that ribbon as if he had won it himself.”

         Elwanda beamed. For a moment Dean was alive and Brenna was a child again.

         With no thought to what she was saying, the words poured out of Elwanda's heart. “I'd do it all again.”

         “What?” Brenna asked.

         “I'd do it all over again.” Elwanda spread her fingers wide to take in the whole of her life. “I'd do it all over again,” she said. “Do everything the same way. Marry the same man and have the same kids.”

         Brenna leaned forward and looked into her mother's eyes. “What are you talking about?”

         Elwanda gave that serene smile again as she patted her daughter's hand. “Tonight, dear, We re-write the rules. You become the mother and I become the child.”

         “I don't understand,” Brenna sounded fearful, like the four-year-old she had once been.

         “I know,” Elwanda said. “I'm dying, Brenna, and I want you to stay here with me, see me out.”

         Brenna jumped up and fished the cell phone from her jeans pocket. “But the doctor said!” Panic rang through her voice.

         “He said you'd be as good as new once that fracture healed.

         Elwanda waved away the young doctor's words. “Doctors don't know anything,not really.”

         “I’ll take you to the emergency room,” Brenna cried.

         Elwanda shook her head. “Won't do any good. When it's time, you have to go. Just stay with me.

         Brenna dropped the phone back into her pocket then grabbed an afghan, one Elwanda had made, from the back of the sofa and wrapped it around her mother's shoulders.

         Elwanda settled into the unintentional hug of her daughter's arms around her.

         “Tell me your favorite childhood memory,” she said.

         Brenna launched into a tale of a family fishing trip  when Dean had caught a catfish that was as long as Cathy, then two years old,, was tall. “We had a time wrestling that catfish into the back of the pickup.”

         “Elwanda chuckled. “He sure did taste good once we got him skinned, cleaned and cooked up.”

         “I wouldn't know,” Brenna said. “you wouldn't let me have any; You said I was too young to eat fish filet.”

         “Rightly so,” Elwanda affirmed. “My sister, June died that way; chocked on a fish bone when she was only three.”

         A far away look came into Elwanda's old eyes.  Her mother had been so young, so foolish to let a young child eat fish filet with the bones in.

         A deep, shuddering sigh shook her body. So much foolishness, so many mistakes and way too much grief in life. There had to be a better way, but she couldn't think of one.

         She just wanted all the pain  grief and loneliness to be gone.

Elwanda and Brenna traded stories all through the night until Elwanda's life was told. Through it all, Brenna held her mother's hand. Around midnight she had stopped begging to be allowed to call for an ambulance.

         “This is my home now,” Elwanda had silence her. “I want to die at home,surrounded by the things and people I love, not in some sterile hospital room with strangers.”

         When the first pink tipped rays of the morning sun streaked through the east window Elwanda sat up straighter. Her eyes opened wide. Seeing things that Brenna could only guess at. She squeezed her daughter's hand one last time. Her head dropped forward and she was no longer in pin and grief. Elwanda was free.