Ha! And I never even used it!

--This was the essay I ended up using for the literary non-fiction submission. Got an A. Eh...

I remember her fingers pressing a small pinkish cockle shell into the glue that covered the bottom third of our paper. Those fingers had always reminded me of the knotted willows down by the river--shriveled, rough, and permanently twisted in on themselves.
She had been diagnosed with early-onset arthritis at the age of twenty, and over the years her hands had been contorted so badly by the disease that when we colored together she had to use the same fat Crayolas I used in preschool. The pain it had caused her had been constant and difficult to escape. On her worst days I can remember her walking to her bedroom and opening the closet door to gaze up at the freezer bags that had been crammed full of pill bottles and tucked up on the highest shelf, but then she would just turn, smile and walk away. As far as I have ever learned, those bottles remained untouched until the very end, and over the years since my grandmother’s death I’ve often wondered what became of all the pain medications which had filled them through the course of my childhood. I have also never been truly certain of why she’d refused to take the pills, but I rather suspect that she had always known the hazards of mixing drugs and alcohol and just didn’t want to take the chance.

Alcoholism was another of her diseases that had been constant and difficult for her to escape. I don’t remember what she was like when she was drunk, but then my mother has told me in more recent years that that’s because she was never sober enough to tell the difference. Apparently, it had always been a source of heavy tension between the two of them. What I do remember about it is that her Kool-Aid had tasted horrible. Bitter and hot, it had burned my throat on the way down. She had warned me to never drink it, but I’ve always been more than a bit stubborn. She had actually been pouring me juice the morning I grabbed her cup from the table, but I had the patience of most small children and simply couldn’t force my tiny self to wait. I suppose the scent should have clued me in on the taste that would follow, but as always, pig headedness prevailed. After that day I had refused to go anywhere near Kool-Aid until I was a teenager. By then I had finally figured out that it was her drink’s vodka content that had tortured my poor tongue. I still don’t like Kool-Aid though.

 I also remember my family having to move when I was five. Before we moved, it had been my grandmother’s responsibility to walk me home from preschool every day. So, together we would wind our way down the short path through the woods across the street from the preschool, follow the dirt road to the old steel bridge that crossed the little river, and then cut through the back pasture behind our barn. One day we had stopped to rest and feed bits of bread to the catfish that swam close to the bank under the bridge. I had loved watching them come up with big, pouty lips, suck the bits into their mouths and dive back down.  As usual, my grandmother had begun spinning me a tale about the merfolk and selkie that lived in the sea and sometimes came to visit her under our “whisker fish bridge”, but that day she had grown silent while I stared into the water, hoping with each tiny ripple to meet a selkie for myself. She had fallen asleep and no matter how much I tickled her, called out or shook her, she just wouldn’t wake up for me. I’d eventually given up and walked the rest of the way alone.

After I had explained what I could to my mother, we both tore out of the house and ran back the way I’d come. My initially relieved mother had quickly become furious when we rounded the corner of the barn and saw my panicked grandmother practically running across the pasture toward us. I remember the tears had streamed down her tired face as she dropped to her knees and threw her arms around me. My mother had to help her walk back to the house. The stress my grandmother had put her damaged joints under had been more than they could take. My mother hissed and fumed and cursed the whole way.  She blamed my grandmother for passing out and decided that we should move out because grandma had become nothing but an “irresponsible drunk”. A few months later we learned she had been diagnosed with narcolepsy.

My grandmother died when I was twelve. By that time my family had permanently branded her an irresponsible alcoholic with debilitating arthritis and narcolepsy. My brother and I however, had never allowed ourselves to be so easily fooled by things like facts, and while we both eventually accepted the determinations of her doctors--the alcoholism, narcolepsy and arthritis--we always believed the accusation of irresponsibility to be an obvious misdiagnosis. In all the years of our lives she had never missed a birthday, report card day, achievement awards day, field day, Thanksgiving, Christmas or Halloween. She had always been there when we needed her, even if only in memory, and while some of my memories of her have faded into oblivion, a great many more remain, like the memory of our walks, the taste of her Kool-Aid and the small pinkish cockle shells pressed into glue.