Grey skies, constant drizzling rain, drooping trees, and whipping cold wind welcomed us into Covid-19 quarantine with a sky that matched our spirits. My husband Rob and I had just moved into a new house a month before the pandemic and were finally feeling settled. Life pre-March was fairly routine. I
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This year, I’m hanging a few lights on my rental house for the first time. Our neighborhood has been conspiring on Facebook to fill up the streets with Christmas lights, and people have been sharing lights and decorations and mapping all of the houses for people to visit. It’s a pinch of goodness in a year that most of us can at least agree has been hard.
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I’ve been hiding out from the world now for 55 days. In the beginning, there was adrenaline coursing through my veins, and I made lists of projects and hopeful homeschool schedules and age-appropriate chore lists written in marker on index cards. Like a lot of us, I heaped pressure on myself and everyone around me to do better and become something better while we had so much unbroken time. We aren’t in the beginning anymore, are we?
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One cloudy summer evening in a quiet Memphis neighborhood, a miracle occurred.
The miracle worker, born and raised in Bells, was my grandmother, Nell Davis Skelton. She had curly, dyed brown hair that was often styled in a pouf reminiscent of a sixties beehive. The large, pitch-black sunglasses that she often wore made me think of a movie star, and she acted like one, too: confident, stylish, opinionated. There was always some new gossip to talk about with Grandmama, and she’d worry and judge and laugh about it in turn. She’d twist her ankle around and around as she talked to you, a sign of pent-up, nervous energy.
Grandmama was, among other things, a cook.
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