My grandmother a tree.

When my maternal grandmother, my Mama, who measured in at a diminutive 5 feet 0 inches tall, hugged you, you felt it, even if you towered over her, as my siblings and I did. When my grandmother wrapped her arms around you in pride, in joy, in tenderness, in compassion, you felt it. You were held.

She never appeared uncertain in anything. She was so sturdy and compactly built, and unquestionably rooted to the earth. I have come in my imagination of her since her passing to see her this way — as a living tree. The brown skin still taut as bark despite her aging, the strong stout legs a trunk, the firm grip branches reaching and keeping each of us, and there are a lot of us, within her grasp.

She knew instinctively how to care for us without words. Sometimes it was being pressed firmly and securely against her buxom chest as a small child as you fought sleep, knowing that the result was inevitable, that even if you tried to wrestle, those thick brown arms would win. And, later, seeing your younger siblings and cousins meet the same fate, chuckling at their futile efforts and somehow in the place beyond your own knowing, longing to be held that way again too. It wasn’t quite tenderness, but it was tender.

My sister tells the story of my grandmother bathing us as babies and her crying for my Papa to do it instead because my well built grandmother scrubbed us so hard and he was so gentle. But, when we were in her care, we were always clean.