129/365 12/28/2025

That summer, the extended family was in a kind of Cold War. On the one side, Gemma Moses sent word it would most probably be her last summer, that fates and angels had come again to take her away. It was the same thing she had done every other summer for the past seven years, and we’d accommodated the schedule. But this summer, 87, she was supposed to keep quiet and didn’t. It threw everyone into a tizzy, not least of whom was Granny Baker, the great-grandmother on my mother’s side. A woman hewn from hardened yew, who ended each day sipping down half an ice cold Pabst while she watched the sunset from her front porch.