A grandmother forgets the word for kettle

In March it was just the word. She would point at the kettle, on the stove, and produce the word for cup, or the word for steam, or, once, for no reason any of them could understand, the word for Tuesday.

In June it was the object. The kettle, in her hands, became a thing of slightly mysterious purpose. She would set it down on the counter, gently, and look at it as though waiting for it to declare itself.

By October, it was the morning the kettle had used to make — the small, ordinary morning, the steam, the cup, the radio on too softly, the grandson at the table.

The grandson, that October, began to make the morning himself. Badly, at first. The radio too loud. The cup wrong. The steam, mostly, in the wrong direction. He learned, over the long, slow year, the shape of the morning in reverse, by paying very close attention to the things she could no longer keep in place.

By the next March, when she had stopped saying his name as well, he could make a passable approximation of the morning she had built, by hand, every day, for sixty-two years.

It was not, of course, the same morning. But the kettle still whistled. The radio was still on. The cup was, by now, mostly right.

She held it, sometimes, without saying anything.