She taught me to read, specifically the reading beyond the reading my teachers were doing, the reading that was for pleasure, that was for the joy of it.
She made me breakfast on Saturday mornings.
The specific breakfast of pancakes with blueberries, from scratch, with real maple syrup, not the kind from the bottle but the kind that her neighbor had given her from his property in Vermont and that she kept in the cabinet for special occasions and that she counted Saturday mornings with me as a special occasion.
She taught me to sew.
She taught me to bake.
She taught me, by example, the specific lesson that shows up in your life in a hundred different situations and that you only understand came from one place when you are old enough to look back at it, which is: be the person who notices what other people need.
I learned this from Rose.
She has been noticing what people need for eighty-six years.
Now I need to tell you what Rose had never done, which is the other side of the story.
Rose had never been on a plane.
She had never been far from North Carolina except for a few trips to Virginia and one trip to Tennessee in the 1970s to visit cousins.
She had never seen the ocean.
Not the Atlantic.
Not any ocean.
She had grown up inland, raised her family inland, lived inland.
The ocean was the thing she associated with photographs and movies and the specific quality of something beautiful that was for other people, the people who traveled, the people whose lives had the kind of margins that permitted vacations.
Her life had not had those margins.
She had raised three children largely on her husband Edwin’s salary, which was the salary of a man who worked at a hardware store for thirty years and who was the best hardware store employee in the county and who was paid like a hardware store employee rather than like the best one.
Edwin died eleven years ago.
He died in his sleep, which is the way he would have chosen, at seventy-eight, in his own bed, with Rose beside him.
She had been alone since then.
Not unhappy.
But alone.
And one of the things Edwin had said to her, many years before he died, was that he wanted to take her to see the ocean.
