The Hayride Grandma Asked For

“Mother, you can’t walk to the dining room without that walker,” my aunt Gail said, loud enough for the whole sunroom table to hear.

“And now you want to climb up on a hay wagon?”

It was a Sunday afternoon in late September, and the sun was coming in long and gold through the big windows of the nursing home at the edge of town.

We had all come straight from church. I still had the bulletin folded in my purse.

Grandma had only said one thing. She had said it quietly, the way she says everything now, with her hands folded on the tablecloth and her eyes on the trees outside.

She had said, “I’d like to ride behind a team one more time, before the leaves come down.”

Three other residents were at our table, plus a daughter-in-law I didn’t know, plus an aide clearing coffee cups.

Every one of them heard Gail. I watched the aide stop with a cup halfway to her tray.

“It’s ridiculous,” Gail went on. “It’s dangerous. Nursing home people can’t ride a hay wagon. I’m not going to sit in that emergency room again because somebody wanted a picture for Facebook.”

Nobody had said a word about Facebook. Nobody had said a word about anything.

Grandma looked down at her napkin and folded it once, then once again, into a neat little square, and set it beside her plate.

“All right, Gail,” she said.

That was all. All right, Gail. And then she asked the woman beside her if she had tried the pumpkin bars, and the table went back to talking about the weather and the beans coming off, and I sat there with my face hot and my coffee going cold.

My name is Tonya Riggs. I’m forty-four. I work as an aide in a second grade classroom at our elementary school, which means I spend my days tying shoes and finding lost lunch tickets and sitting beside the kids who need somebody to sit beside them.

I know what it looks like when somebody gets small in front of a room.

My grandmother, Elnora Riggs, got small in front of a room that Sunday. I had never seen it before.

She is ninety-one years old and she has buried a husband, a son, two sisters, and most of the people she went to high school with, and I had never once seen her fold up like that.

The girl who drove the team

You have to understand who Grandma was before the walker.

She grew up on her daddy’s farm north of town, on the same gravel roads I drive to work, and her daddy farmed with horses longer than anybody else in the township.

He had a team of sorrels, Grandma told me once, and by the time she was twelve she could harness them alone.

She drove them to the elevator with a wagon of oats when she was fourteen, sitting up on the seat with her braids tied back, and the men at the scale used to whistle.

She drove that team until she was nineteen, when she married my grandpa and moved to town, and her daddy finally bought a tractor.

She said she cried the day the horses went to the sale barn. She said she never cried about anything else that year, including her own wedding.

When I was a little girl she used to take me out to see other people’s horses.

We would stop on the shoulder of the road and she would lean on a fence and talk to whatever was grazing there, and they always came to her. Always. I thought she had magic in her.

So when I married a man who kept Belgians, Grandma said it was the best thing I ever did. She told Bud so at our wedding.

She held his face in both her hands and said, “You take care of my girl and you take care of those horses, and I’ll pray for you every night.”

She has. Twenty-two years. I believe it has done him some good.