Light and Spark

Before the sun rose, we’d sit in Alice’s dining room, sipping coffee, waiting for the rest of the house to wake up. The grandfather clock by the front door marking time. Everything seemed so normal, so routine during that summer visit. Sure, Alice would repeat stories a few times—she was in her 60s after all. Her house looked a touch worse for the wear. Chipped paint, tattered carpet, a sagging front porch step. Plastic tarp covered a hole in one window. The house had been in the family for near a hundred years. Bound to happen. We told ourselves.

Buckeye trees framed the house and their roots tore through the cement sidewalks. From her front porch, Alice still sipped her dark coffee and took drags on her Virginia Slims as she watched the neighbors go by. Her laughter sounded like a mischievous Irish sprite as she chatted about her newest boyfriend. She always had a new boyfriend. I looked toward my cousin to confirm this story was true. She nodded, not in approval but in confirmation.

“He lives over in Mansfield. We take turns driving over for our dates,” Alice smiled, a satisfied housecat. She whispered a detail about her love life in my ear. “Dynamite comes in small packages.” She winked at me and purred, “Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

Later, after Alice went to bed, my cousin updated us on the situation. “She’s forgetting to eat. Forgetting to pay her utility bills. She almost had her gas turned off.”

I didn’t see Alice every day. I lived two thousand miles away. Alice was aging, of course. What was “normal” when one aged? I wavered. Knowing that my voice could sentence my aunt to a nursing home. A home—for god’s sake, not this woman. She who had been fiery like dynamite personified. The grandfather clock struck midnight.

My cousin broke the silence, “I’m taking her to the Cleveland Clinic. They’re going to test her for Alzheimer’s. Dementia.”

I think I sighed. I knew where the family’s talks had been leading. I’d known it for months. “Let me know what they find.”

A week later, I said goodbye, boarded a plane, and flew home.

I knew what the next phone call would bring.

“I’m packing her things. Val’s taking the old photographs—the ones that used to be Grandpa’s.”

I heard my cousin inhale. She’s smoking again, I noted. Who wouldn’t?

“I’ve got to sell her car and the furniture. Shit, she racked up overdue bills. She won’t need any of that stuff in the home anyways.”

Our last summer visit happened in the nursing home. A single room, a single bed, a few framed photos. Sterile. Alice in a house dress. Without makeup. She called me by name. We hugged and I couldn’t let her go.

But then she let go and her memories, all jumbled together, drained her. She sat down on the bed. She grew agitated. Light and spark flashed in her eyes, but she fumbled for words. We said goodbye.

Alice’s house on York Street had sold—my cousin had to do it, to pay off bills and to cover the nursing home expenses. Instead of driving to Alice’s home, I drove to a shabby hotel north of town. For thirty years, I had stayed at Alice’s place. But not tonight. It was not our family’s anymore.

Ohio summers are the most picturesque portraits of Americana. Tidy farmhouses, orderly cornfields, train whistles, gentle breezes, picnic tables, dandelions. I sat outside the hotel that evening, watching fireflies illuminate the darkness. A flicker here. A spark there. A random dance of warmth and recognition. Scientists have a word for it: Bioluminescence.

I smiled, remembering those summer nights as a child at Alice’s house, chasing fireflies and capturing them in glass jars. The grass soft and cool under our bare feet. We’d giggle as they flickered and then we’d release them. Be free, we’d shout into the night.

Days spent coloring her sidewalk with pastel chalk under buckeye trees. Playing Rummy 500 with her in the dining room. She’d slip me a dollar bill and let me walk to the carry-out to get a blue raspberry slushie or king-size candy bar. “Don’t tell your mom,” she’d wink.

I was sitting on a quiet beach in St. Augustine when I knew she died. Premonition? Visitation? Scientists will deny the possibility. But the science does not matter. The waves, the sand, the open space. When she visited us, in Florida, she loved to sit on the sand and watch the waves roll in. And have a smoke. I felt her exhale the day she died. The waves cresting, the foam on the sand.

The phone call came later and I packed my bags to go back to Ohio for her funeral.

Today is her birthday. She’s been gone for more than twenty years. Today I walked in a sunny park in Ireland, thinking of her laughter and her mischievous eyes. Tonight I’m going to a pub and I will smile at all the men. And think of her. And flicker and glow.

Alice, light and spark and fire. In rural Ohio, Alice crackled with sass. Alice was like a movie star, a Jane Russell. Set hair, deep red Avon lipstick and jet-black eyeliner. Cat eyes. Cigarettes and smoke and coffee. She was everything I hoped to be.

She’d let me play in her make-up and spritz on her perfume. I’d paint on lipstick and she would talk to me like I was not a child but her co-conspirator. We’d cruise the town in her Buick Regal. She’d wave to folks and wink at the men. She’d laugh. My God would she laugh. Bioluminescence.