Cinnamon Toast

I do not remember a time when Mamaw didn’t live in this house. As a child, I remember sick days spent with Mamaw and Papaw while my parents worked. Papaw, a doctor, would check my temperature and give me orange juice. Mamaw would make me cinnamon toast and I would lie on the couch watching cartoons, feeling significantly less sickly with sugar and warm butter melting on my tongue.

The house is stuffed, every inch, with trinkets. Papers. Birth certificates. Birthday cards. National Geographic magazines. Cookbooks. Drawings and letters and pictures of 4 children, of 13 grandchildren. To dig through a drawer is to unearth a lifetime of memory.

My cousin, Lauren, gave me a hug in the kitchen the day of Papaw’s funeral, and she told me I was the “luckiest one” being the eldest, since I knew our Grandfather the longest. She was young, and completely correct.

My youngest cousin, Ian, bruised my left cheek when he repeatedly threw my pink bracelet at my head, a delightful game to a nearly-two-year-old.

I sang my sister, Caroline, to sleep on the couch in the living room with a medley of show tunes.

I read ancient love letters found in the drawers of the trundle room.

I ran to jump on my Papaw’s lap and my mom scolded me. He was fragile. I always forgot.

My great-aunt MaryAnne began to die in the den where I sleep tonight, her lungs tired.

I cried myself to sleep for months in the bedroom down the hall, wishing I could be back in New Orleans, wondering if that would be possible.

And now my Mamaw does not live here anymore. The house is still in the family, the trinkets still explode from beneath couches and secret closets.

But my Mamaw does not live here anymore. And that will always make me sad.