Namesake

On Sundays, I take my grandmother to the cemetery to visit her mother. With her is a straw broom, small enough to carry in a reusable bag. When I was young, I would pull from that broom, break its straw to pieces, and throw them, watching as they spun to the ground like helicopter seeds. Now, in my grandmother’s hands, the broom brushes away dirt and moss and leaves from a headstone that shares my name.

“Lena,” my grandmother says, “can you pull the weeds?”   

“Mm,” I say, answering more with motion. The weeds are really just blades of overgrown grass, and I trim them back with my hands, making a mental note to bring gardening gloves and scissors for our next visit. My grandmother moves on to the neighboring graves, sweeping them with her strong, steady hands. Those hands, born the same year of the Great Depression, tried to teach me to sew, like her mother—a widow and seamstress who made dresses for brides.

“Your Dear Mom made Aunt Mary-Ann’s wedding dress,” my mother told me some years before. “She was a special person.”

“I know,” I’d told her. And I did. Knew her from the small back room of her home, filled with toys from a different generation. The kind of toys etched from wood, forming shapes of ducks and rabbits. I knew her from the green carpet leading to her front door, and the “crystals” I would collect after each visit, a fishbowl filled with clear marbles. From her floral couch, and the way she would knit each of her fingers into the other before opening her palms wide, in a sudden burst, saying: “Catch the birds before they fly!”

“Your Grandma Vi believed that people are reborn into the same families,” my mother said, speaking of my other great-grandmother, Viola. Sometimes, I find myself wondering if that was the reason my mother named her children after family members. That a namesake is not just the inheritance of a name, but of the soul. 

Now as I gather grass and watch my grandmother clean the headstones of others, I think of her name, Beatrice, which means, “she who brings happiness.” It’s fitting. The aura that surrounds her is that of fireflies caught in tiny hands, grilled cheese lunches, and car horn-goodbyes. As she passes by each stone, I wonder if the spirits in this place can feel their childhoods through her too. And I think, if I should have a daughter, she, too, will share a name.   

-Lena Kinder

Lena Kinder emerged from the mudflats of Alaska as an oddity, and somehow ended up in the muddier lands of Mississippi as an MA student in creative writing at the University of Southern Mississippi. She is the managing editor for Folklore Review and has previously acted as assistant editor for the Mississippi Review and Product Magazine. Her works can be found in Crow and Cross Keys and the Sucarnochee Review.