I WHILED AWAY HOURS on my Grandmother’s front porch. I picked slivers of flaking, blue paint from her railing. I pulled the legs from daddy-long-legs and dropped their bodies between the boards. I used my pocket knife to carve new swear words into hidden corners whenever I overheard them from my grandfather’s closed-door phone calls.
It was on that porch that my Grandmother taught me what the meaning of life is not.
I perched on her wicker rocking chair in the shade while she hunched over her still. I’d had to claim the threadbare floral-print cushion from the neighbour’s farm cat, and now I pumped my legs as if on a swing set. The rocking chair bucked like I imagined Aria must have, in her youth.
“A life without direction is meaningless,” my Grandmother said.
The neighbour’s cat watched my chair from the front lawn, its tail stiff and thick as a toilet scrubber. I heard dogs barking in the distance and the cat’s ears twitched towards the sound, but otherwise it didn’t move.
“Take your father,” she said. “A writer. Murder mysteries and ten-cent thrillers, and after putting himself through law school. Bloody waste, if you ask me.”
My Grandmother sucked on her teeth, her sound of disapproval. “And don’t say bloody,” she added. “That’s a grown-up word.”
“Like shit,” I said.
“And don’t say shit.”
“What about ‘piece of shit’?”
“Only if it’s lying on the ground.”
I would have nodded but I was busy clinging to the rocking chair, wondering if I could make it tip over from the sheer force of my body motion. I craned my neck to see how close I was to the railing, thought about being thrown over the side and dive-bombing the cat.
“Dad says I can’t read his books yet.”
“That’s right,” my Grandmother said.
“Because they’re adult books.”
“Because they’re shit.”
She slowly turned up the heat on the Coleman stove, and the homemade distillery bubbled to life. The smell of sour beer and burning plastic permeated the porch.
“Stop rocking,” Grandmother said. “That’s an antique. Now give us a swig.”
My Grandmother handed me a thimble of moonshine to sample. My grandfather was no help in her brewing—he’d drink a whole mason jar of anything, then shrug noncommittally—so I was her laboratory rat whenever she tried to create something new. If I didn’t make a face then she knew that it was still too sweet and would let it bubble for a while longer.
On this occasion, my Grandmother smiled at my sour face, the wrinkles around her mouth deepening into crevasses. She turned the heat back down.
“What’s the direction of your life?” I asked her, bored now that I wasn’t moving. The cat had run from the lawn.
“At the moment, it’s to not screw up this cider.”
“I think mine is to watch TV.”
My Grandmother chuckled, a dry sound from the back of her throat. “See if your cartoons are on. Tell your gramps to fetch me some bottles.”
“I could get you some bottles.” I enjoyed the trek into the cellar, which was normally off limits. Grandpa kept a shotgun down there, and a stuffed moose head he said came from Wetaskiwin, and that’s where my Grandmother hid her rhubarb preserve.
My Grandmother studied me for a moment. “All right,” she said, as she pulled the cord with the cellar key up and over her head. She placed it in my eager palm. “Go on then. Mind the steep steps and don’t bring too many at once like last time, or you’re sweeping up the glass.”