I like to remember my nana in the back yard of her sprawling ranch in Jacksonville, Florida, watering and pruning the flowering plants and trees she’d surrounded herself with. In a magenta bathing suit and wraparound skirt, her hair twisted up in back with translucent plastic combs, she ruled over the tropical realm she created on a corner lot of a working-class neighborhood, her attempt to recreate the Cuba of her childhood. Surrounded by a tall fence and backing to an alligator-infested canal, my grandparents’ back yard was a magical backdrop for my childhood imagination. I would jump into the cool waters of the pool, float on my back, and listen to the trickle of the fountain framed by two banana trees. I would peek under the Amazonian elephant’s ear and anthurium in search of lizards, test the sharpness of the palm fronts against my tiny fingers. I loved the wetness of it all, moisture clinging to the soil, leaves, and petals, the seduction of the heat a sharp contrast to the coolness of the slate path leading down to the canal.

Like my two children, I walked young—at eight months, according to my mother—and once in motion, never slowed. All the stories my mom and nana tell of me as a baby begin like this: “One time, Jessica had wandered off and I couldn’t find her anywhere. I searched the whole house and finally found her…

…on top of the refrigerator. She’d climbed up like a little monkey!”

…outside in the garden, eating every single strawberry off the plants!”

…out back in the ivy, most of the way down to the canal!”

I’m sure I don’t really remember any of this happening. I’m sure I’ve just heard the stories over and over again. But my memories of the canal are visceral, the ivy, somehow taller than ground cover, wet with early-morning dew. The feel of the slate stepping stones on my chubby feet, my knees, my thighs. The allure of the mist rising off the muddy water. The thrill of alligators.

Now, I sit at my nana’s feet on her hospital bed in the shared nursing home room. Her legs curl up to her chest and her hand shakes as she struggles to pull the woven cotton blanket over her shoulders. I look at the display on the AC unit—73 degrees.

“What’s it like out?” my nana asks.

“Gorgeous,” I say. “The sun is shining. It’s almost 80 degrees. Beautiful.” I don’t tell her there’s snow in the weekend forecast. Just a chance, but we’ll definitely have another cold snap or two before it really starts to warm up. People joke about Asheville weather in the spring:

“You wear snow boots and flip-flops in the same week? Must live in Asheville.”

“Don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes.”

My nana’s eyes start to close and her lips part, her breath shallow and ragged from a recent cold, another in a growing list of moments we thought we’d lose her. When I visit her these days, all I can think is how young she looks, how childish. She’s always been tiny—my height, almost five foot one—but she seems smaller now and softer than she’s ever been.

Hair that was once bleached blonde, teased and sprayed to frame her face, is longer now, a silky, silvery white, pulled back into a ponytail. I tell her how beautiful she looks every time I see her.

“Really?” Her over-plucked eyebrows raise, and her mouth forms a tiny o. I don’t think she believes me.

I hate the clothes she wears in the nursing home: LuLaRoe leggings my tween daughter discarded when everyone traded their softness for sexy spandex and side-pockets for phones. I bought her pants and sweaters I thought she’d like for Christmas, but no one puts the matching sets together, no one notices that today they’ve paired bright red and yellow-flowered leggings with a blush-pink top.

I try not to think about how much my nana would hate her fit, as my kids would say. I try to remember that, more likely than not, she has no idea what she’s wearing. I try not to remember the walk-in closet she used to have in that rambling brick Florida ranch. But I do. It was a hidden treasure, separated from the master bathroom she and my papa shared by a glittery purple beaded curtain. I loved the hardness of the plastic beads as they brushed my hands, shoulders, legs as I followed Nana into the closet. I was in awe of the colors, textures, patterns of the meticulously hung dresses, pants, skirts lining its walls, the rows of boots, pumps, sandals arranged below. When I was little, we loved to play dress-up, my nana and I. When I was older, we’d go thrift shopping, rummaging until we found that one discarded treasure in just the right hue, fabric, cut.

I remember the last time my nana was well enough to go shopping with me. She and my papa had retired to Crescent Beach, and we drove together into downtown St. Augustine. She was already well into her eighties, and I parked illegally to get close enough to the shopping district so that she would be able to make the walk. We took it slow. I wanted to make sure we hit the bath shop
with her favorite soaps, imported from Spain, and the historic panaderia that she swore made the best bread. Then, we made an unexpected stop.

“Nana, look at these!” A rack outside a hippie boutique showcased wraparound skirts upcycled from saris. I loved the contrasting colors and patterns, the smoothness of the silk.

“Oooohhh!” she said, “Beautiful! And they’re on sale—two for twenty. Let’s both get one. We’ll be matching!”

“Really? You like them?” I laughed. Boho could never have been used to describe my nana’s style. But we picked out two: mine a ballet pink with black-and-white flowers over a swirling turquoise print, my nana’s a lilac floral over mint-green zig zags. I shuffled the bag onto my arm and took my nana’s hand to steady her. The streets of the old town were uneven cobblestone, but we made it back to the car before I got a ticket and wore our matching skirts to dinner that night, laughing as we held them down when the sea breezes blew around our legs.

Now, my nana’s eyelids flutter shut, and I hear her roommate on the phone.

“You’ve got to come take me outta here.” Her Southern drawl penetrates the ineffectual curtains drawn between the two beds. “It’s unbearably hot.”

I check the thermostat—74. I wonder if I’m feeling hot. Not really. But I have to admit the room is warm. My mother, I realize, would have complained the moment she walked in. Oh my God, Mom. How can you stand it so hot in here? she would say, and turn up the AC.

My husband and I installed a pellet stove in our living room, mostly because I’m always cold, even in the mild Asheville winters, and propane is expensive. I can’t imagine growing up as he did in Montana where it’s too cold to snow, to be outside, most of the winter. I feed and start the stove as soon as I’m home from work most days, starting around October. Even my hot-natured hubby, who still wears shorts and Hawaiian shirts in the winter, has started acclimating to my tropical nature. “Mmmmmm. Nice and toasty,” he says, as he walks into the house on chilly evenings. But if my mother’s coming over, I’ll turn the stove off at least an hour in advance. And sometimes open a window. And throw on a sweater.

“I’ve tried,” the roommate continues after a pause. “Every time I ask them to turn it up, that other gal complains.” Poor woman. When I walked in, I noticed her pained expression, bare legs kicked out from under the hospital sheets. I assumed it was the habitual pain of the elderly, that her undress was forgetfulness. But the woman was simply hot, like most folks would be, trapped in these four walls with one tiny window opening to a courtyard, displaying nothing but the brick and mortar of another wing, with other windows opening into other cinder block cells just like this one.

I turn the AC down to 72—a compromise?—and make a mental note to tell my mom. Perhaps they can trade beds so the roommate is closer to the AC. I miss my nana’s previous roommate, a beautiful old woman with steel gray hair and such a young, lively name: Alicia. Pronounced in Spanish, honoring each vowel: A-LEE-see-ah.

Alicia only spoke Spanish, my nana’s mother tongue, which is why they put them together, but for some reason, my nana refuses to speak Spanish in the nursing home. Every time I visited, I would walk in and greet Alicia in Spanish. Her eyes would light up, and she’d be off in a steady stream so fast I could barely keep up. I’d speak to her for a moment or two before moving on to my nana, sometimes with Alicia continuing in Spanish behind me. I hated myself for walking away, for not continuing the conversation. After the holidays, I found Alicia’s bed empty. My mom confirmed the worst. And now my nana has a new roommate who is tall and thin, very white, and very hot-natured. Luckily, my nana sleeps most of the time. I’m not sure she’s even aware there’s someone new in the room.

I hate to wake her. “Nana,” I say, laying a hand on her hip, “do you want me to leave so you can sleep?”

Her eyes open immediately. “No, no, no,” she says, “don’t go. I like you here.” For a moment, she seems scared. I catch myself contrasting this woman with the one I used to know, only a few years back, it seems. The woman who traveled with me, shopped with me, flew a plane over the Sierra Nevada and down into California wine country with me. The contrast is unsettling.

“It’s okay,” I say, “I won’t go.” She raises her head, struggles to prop herself up on her elbows, and asks me her litany of questions, the same every week:

“Are you still in the same job?”

“Yes, Nana. At the university.”

“And they pay you well?”

“They pay me okay.”

“But you don’t have to work in the summer?”

“Well, it looks like I might have to teach this summer.”

“But they pay you extra?”

“Yes, they pay me extra.”

“Do you live near here?”

This one is always hard to answer. Her understanding of “here” is foggy at best. I’m never sure she knows that she moved from Florida to North Carolina two years ago, shortly after the start of the pandemic. “Yes,” I do my best to answer, “just fifteen minutes from here, Nana. On the other side of town.”

“And are you close to your mom? To…” Here I see the change in her eyes as she struggles to remember that her husband lives in an apartment on my mom and stepdad’s property. “Close to your papa?”

“It’s about twenty, twenty-five minutes depending on traffic,” I tell her.

“I think they’re bringing me home,” she whispers, “tomorrow. This place, it’s a good place, they treat me like royalty, but…it’s not home, you know?”

“I do know, Nana. They’re working on bringing you home, as soon as they can,” I say. At this point, my nana can’t walk, can’t get up out of bed or stand on her own, so she can’t fall like she did two Christmases ago, rushed to the hospital and into surgery—another moment I was sure we’d lose her—and then to the nursing home for rehab.

My mom was so anxious she’d fall again that they left her there, through COVID and all the changing visiting regulations: only outdoor visits, only masked, only vaccinated, boosted, only one visitor at a time, no children. She’d survived the worst of the pandemic, a number of mini-strokes, a couple of colds that could have been the end for someone her age, and finally she’d been whittled down into something small and weak enough to not be a liability. My mom ordered a chairlift for the stairs leading up to the garage apartment and was waiting on my stepdad to finish installation. My nana had been asking to go home for so long, I was petrified to give her false hope. But it looked like it was finally happening.

“I think they’re going to bring you home in two weeks,” I say.

“Really?” Yet again, I don’t think she believes me. “No, I think it’s tomorrow. Next time you come to see me, I’ll be home.”

“Okay, Nana.” I give up. But I wonder if the home they bring her to will feel like home. I wonder what she means by home. We helped my grandparents move in, helped my papa arrange
furniture, hang curtains, set up the kitchen. Many of their things—portraits, paintings, doilies, ceramics—are there; more are packed in boxes in the garage below, some have been given away. I pray enough remains that she’ll believe she’s home.

Perhaps it’s a blessing she won’t be able to get out of bed, walk to the window in search of the ocean, only to see the mountains looming in the distance. That instead of palm trees, her beloved bougainvillea and hibiscus, she’ll see the sturdy sycamore, changing with the seasons.

“You know what they say.” Back in the nursing home, Nana’s eyes wander. I’ve wheeled her into the sunroom, our favorite place to sit and visit, with a floor-to-ceiling birdcage housing a small tree and parakeets, large windows overlooking the surrounding western North Carolina woods. “The Garden of Eden was in the tropics,” she resumes the tale she’s told me a million times, “That’s where all the best fruits and vegetables grow, everything good to eat, warm enough to swim all year, flowers everywhere. When Adam and Eve were banished, they had to move away, north and south, away from everything good.” She smiles and closes her eyes. Far from her beautiful garden, from the waters and warmth we love, I hear the yearning in her voice and feel the call to adventure and paradise.

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