Summer's Sweet Lightning

I remember the summer my granddaughter Emma came to stay. She was twelve, that beautiful age between childhood and teenagerhood, full of questions about everything.

"Why do you keep a papaya on the windowsill?" she asked, pointing to the fruit I'd picked up at the farmer's market.

"It reminds me of your grandfather," I said, slicing into the bright orange flesh. "We spent our honeymoon in Hawaii. He'd never seen papaya before. Tried to eat it with a fork and knife, like a steak."

Emma giggled, and the sound reminded me of how laughter used to fill this house.

Our old cat, Oliver, who'd been with me through fifteen years of widowhood, jumped onto the counter. He'd lost his hearing but not his dignity. I gave him a tiny piece of papaya—he'd developed quite the taste for tropical fruit in his old age. The vet said it was fine. I figured after nineteen years, Oliver had earned his eccentricities.

That evening, a thunderstorm rolled in off the lake. Lightning flashed across the sky, illuminating the kitchen where we stood making papaya bread from my grandmother's recipe.

"I used to be afraid of storms," I told Emma as she helped me measure flour. "My mother taught me to count the seconds between lightning and thunder. 'That's how far away the trouble is,' she'd say. And some trouble, like storms, passes quickly enough."

Emma looked up at me, flour dusting her nose. "Did you and Grandpa have storms?"

I laughed, surprising myself. "The kind that don't pass with the weather. But the thing about marriage, about any long love, is that you learn which battles are worth fighting and which are just noise. Your grandfather never did learn to like papaya, but he learned to love watching me enjoy it."

Oliver wound around our ankles, purring despite his deafness. Some instincts never fade.

We ate the warm bread, papaya and cinnamon sweet on our tongues, as the rain tapped against the windowpane. I watched Emma, thinking of how she'd one day tell her own grandchildren about the summer she learned to make papaya bread, about the old cat who loved tropical fruit, about the lightning storm that illuminated everything just so.

That's what they don't tell you about getting old: it's not just the memories you keep, but the ones you're still making, papaya and all.