Tea

Several months before my grandfather died, Mam- mam was making tea and as she carried a soup-pot of boiling water to the table where the cup and tea bag waited, somehow – for some reason - she fell. Boiling water splashed on her upper chest and down her left arm. She was alone but somehow managed to reach the phone. When admitted to the hospital she took a room on the floor above my grandfather’s. She had multiple operations in which the top two layers of her epidermis and a layer of her dermis were taken from donor sites on her upper thigh and grafted to her chest and arm. She was in excruciating pain when she visited her husband from her own hospital room but she never told him about the accident – he died there without knowing.

Many years later, and after the third teakettle in as many weeks, my mother started wondering what was happening to them. After the fifth she found out. The snow was heavy that winter and when it finally started to melt in early March it revealed the remnants of four aluminum teakettles; the bottoms of each were melted away. Mammam would put water on the stove for tea and then forget to take it from the electric burner, the water would dissipate and the aluminum would dissolve on the red-hot surface. She hid the kettles in the snow under the hydrangea bush because she knew that evidence of such an incident would certainly prompt disconcertion – especially with her tainted record of teapot toting. She was correct. That spring, concerned with her ability to navigate the necessities of the everyday, my parents took her to a nursing home – the same one in which she had worked as a nurse’s aid years earlier.