A Moon Flower After Midnight

A little after 1:00 a.m. on Friday, January 26, I finally fell asleep in a Nashville hotel room. A few minutes later in Lime Lake, New York, Ruth Elizabeth Boberg left her frail humanity to start her afterlife. You might not know who this kind soul is, even if I told you she went by “Bette.” But I owe every adventure I’ve ever experienced to her and her daughter. See, my arrival on this planet made Bette a grandmother at just 39 years old.

You’d have loved my Gramma Boberg. She always had fresh molasses cookies in the third drawer across from her photo-plastered fridge. I don’t even like molasses cookies, but I’d eat one from Gramma’s stash while foraging through the options in the snack drawer. In that same kitchen, I also ate broccoli—which I have always abhorred—because you couldn’t leave the dinner table until you’d eaten everything on your plate. And you didn’t have a choice of what was on your plate.

Most of that rigidity was because I sat next to Grampa, who thought you should eat broccoli and anything else he liked until you liked it. He didn’t feel that way about rice, ravioli, or pizza, which is why Gramma had to sneak those to us on the nights Grampa ate dinner down at the Lions Club or at whatever tavern he was singing country songs older than my birth certificate.

Gramma sneaked that subversiveness into conversations, too. I heard a lot of strident opinions in that kitchen and in the plush, orange chairs of the adjacent living room. Gramma had heard far more and had learned an interjection I didn’t appreciate until after her passing. She would take a long breath and then exhale, “Oh, I don’t know.” Bette wasn’t a pushover, but she knew most hot takes eventually cool via extended exposure to reality.

For the past forty-two years, I’ve not lived in the same state as my grandmother; but my visits to her hilltop home almost always taught me something. Before I was a kindergartner, it was how to cross-country ski. When I was in elementary school, it was how to dig potatoes and pick & shuck corn for dinner. In junior high, it was how to drive a snowmobile. In high school, it was home remedies for a horrible sunburn. In college, I learned that Gramma had never gotten a proper marriage proposal. So, I wrote a college creative writing paper about her Burns Hill home and then proposed to my girlfriend there. At my wedding, I learned I had hurt my Gramma’s feelings when she roasted me at the reception: “When Ryan was a baby, he refused to be hugged.” After I’d been married a few years, she told me how to skip a snowmobile across her pond in the summertime. “Just pull back on the handlebars and keep it above 35mph.”

She had pulled off that daring feat—in her fifties. Despite all of the adrenaline rushes I’ve tried, the closest I’ve ever gotten to even attempting it was riding on the back as my uncle pulled it off. My grandma drove pickup trucks, tractors, mowers, and UTVs well into her retirement years. She customized her Kawasaki Mule with a frilly valance that hung from the roll bars—because the machine whose pedal she mashed the most was her sewing machine.

I remember the smell of her sewing room (and the Vicks VapoRub that overwhelmed that ambiance when I slept in there while battling a cold). Gramma made every newlywed in her family a quilt. Every little kid in our family got a homemade stuffie. In the mental folder that holds my memories of Gramma, a bunch of the files show her wearing a thimble. Others show her with the letters from her pen pal in England. Yet others show her in the dresses she wore to weddings, some of which she sewed herself.

Gramma was content to live a quiet life—a contentment to which I aspire. Wikipedia says that the 14171 where she lived is “a hamlet in the Town of Ashford in Cattaraugus County.” The hollow that held little West Valley, NY, was home to a tiny high school where for a season “school” was misspelled on the school bus in what is currently the poorest county in New York. Anyway, I assume she found that unassuming perspective as one of nine kids on Wilfred Jones’ farm, but part of me hopes she grew into that—just so there’s hope for me to follow her example.

Gramma found joy in simple things. She tended a small batch of night-blooming morning glories she called “moon flowers,” and I remember her giddily scooting us toward the white bulbs as their pedals popped open right after sunset. Summer nights had magic, if we knew where to look. And she always did. I’ve been looking for beauty and serendipity in the outdoors ever since.

Even her laugh was humble. You’d have giggled with her because every time I ever heard her laugh, it started with an innocent giggle. It was as if jokes tangibly tickled her—as if joy was escaping her heart through her squinted eyes. She punctuated her declarations with pauses for wide smiles. In her later years, those pauses came more often, accompanying a voice that warbled her words as if from a wise songbird.

I’m still not much of a hugger, but I’ll never forget the last time I hugged Gramma. I visited her at The Pines, the rehabilitation center to which she returned for her final weeks. My aunt had wheeled her out into the sunshine across from where the staff kept chickens for the entertainment and nostalgia of its rural residents.

Gramma didn’t know who I was. I didn’t need her to know. I was in good company, as she didn’t know half of the people who encircled her. In the bright rays of an August afternoon, she smiled as she searched my eyes—satisfied to sit with strangers. A tiny sparkle of wonder glistened below her eyelids. In her dementia, she had forgotten to maintain any façades, and she didn’t need to remember. She was the real Bette at a picnic table with nobody to impress, no masks to hold against her wrinkled cheeks.

Her wheelchair held the antithesis of a culture that needs the world to know who we are and then affirm it. My aunt combed the disheveled hair and inspected the gnarled toes of a woman who owned the antidote to my decades of striving for significance. I realized in that moment that my grandmother at her core was exactly who I wanted to remember for always. She was who I still want to be at her age.

Somehow, I knew that would be the last time I’d ever look into Gramma Boberg’s eyes. I bent down and wrapped my arm around her shoulder blades. “Goodbye, Gramma. I love you.” She smiled, not knowing it was our last goodbye, not realizing I was giving her the hug she deserved back when I was her only grandchild.

Exactly five months to the day of that hug under the first full moon of 2024, the moon flower of Bette Boberg’s soul opened. Gramma left us all in her sleep, unassuming as always. She didn’t need to say goodbye to me, because she knew she’d get lots of chances to say it from every full moon for the rest of my life.

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Stock flower image purchased from iStockPhoto.com