Long Years apart—can make no 
Breach a second cannot fill—
The absence of the Witch does not 
Invalidate the spell— 
 
The embers of a Thousand Years 
Uncovered by the Hand
That fondled them when they were Fire 
Will stir and understand— 
 
Emily Dickenson.
 
My grandmother, Francoise, OGPITA. 
I remember the feeling of Mondays - like Christmas - when it was my turn to stay the night at your house, you picking me up from school wearing slippers and holding actual pain au chocolate (white bread, butter with a small square of bitter cooking chocolate), making so many things with you - monsters, princesses, frogs and the silliest faces. Hats, adorned with feathers and tiny birds, the many many things that were not hats that you wore as hats, the smell of your perfume on the handkerchief you’d put it on that I would take home with me to put under my pillow every night until I’d see you again, you dancing in your underwear in your seventies until 4 in the morning at a wedding, the way you would take my hand and rub it with your mighty giant’s thumbs (until I thought my skin would come off), you walking me down the aisle on the hottest day on record in France, putting your great grand-daughter into your arms for the first time, her sitting on your lap a year later playing with your locket, the one with the teeth marks from me biting it when I was her age. 
I can’t stop thinking about your house, how the warmth and stillness cocooned immediately upon stepping inside. The steady beating baseline of many grandfather clocks. The woody perfume of Darjeeling, wool, and church. You might hate that reference. Organized religion made you claustrophobic but you were the most spiritual person I’ve ever met. Maybe it’s all the wooden relics you keep, or the dust that settles on top of your cabinet of curiosities. I don’t know. The way that it’s full to the brim of pieces of you - a grimacing mask, a womb, a eulogy. 
You lived your life with the force of a thousand rivers crashing down to the sea. You named yourself The Goddess OGPITA, Oh Great Pain in The Ass. You made up your own religion but what you might not know is that you are mine. Everything that is magnificent, generous and fiercely living in this world is connected to you. The final reserves of strength that it took to push my baby out of me. My absolute insistence that I was not getting in the ambulance - it all comes from you. 
It is very like you to do this between a lunar and a solar eclipse. Like you’re conspiring with nature to tell us all that your power exceeds this world. Here, on this humble planet, you will live on in the sound of the owl that hoots goodnight every evening by my house, the wind, the feeling of sunlight baked stone, the bitter and sweet taste of dark chocolate. Whenever I walk to the ocean or run my fingers over the 
gnarled bark of an ancient tree, I will feel you rubbing the skin of my hand raw again with your mighty thumbs.