Leaning forward in her chair, wispy gray hair standing up from her head, fire in her eyes, she’s swatting at me with her cane and muttering in Polish. I know to not get too close. This is my step-great-grandmother, but we never called her that. She was “Old Grammie” to us.

Old Grammie immigrated from Poland to Connecticut as a teen where she married a farmer and had six children. She spent her adulthood at their dairy farm, working hard as a wife, mother and dairywoman.

As a teenager I donned a cheap polyester red-and-white striped smock, pantyhose, and a white blouse, and officially became a candystriper at a local hospital.

I offloaded tasks from hospital employees whose skills were needed elsewhere. I compliantly carried unbagged urine specimens with my bare hands from patient floors to the lab, pre-universal precautions. How gross in retrospect. I delivered flowers to patient rooms, dropped off meal trays, and refilled bedside water pitchers.

“Your dad makes wonderful films. They mean a lot to all of us.” I stood there in my N95 mask and safety goggles next to a 97-year-old in memory care on hospice, mouth agape. How did she know my dad was a filmmaker? Was she psychic?

Moments before, she’d been confabulating, making up memories to fill gaps in her knowledge. She was under five feet tall, weighed less than a hundred pounds, and grew up female in America in the 1930s. Yet she told me she’d beat the biggest prizefighter in Philadelphia in a boxing match. The odds of that

Time is circular.

Or so you’d think if you listened to what my mother says, the various iterations of a conversation slipping through the cracks of her memory, reused and recycled ad infinitum.

Memory does not persist.

Instead, the allure of rebirth too enticing, it devours its own tail.

Tina Arkee
Nashville, Tennessee

*An Ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a snake or dragon eating its own tail.

I can’t delete her voicemails. They span over a decade of my life and offer a lifeline to a woman who shaped it.

My grandma wasn’t related to me; she was a customer at the bank where my mom worked in Las Vegas. She chose to love my mom and, eventually, my brother and me.

I spent my childhood chasing her cat, Marmalade, around the house and telling stories with a flashlight under my chin. She taught me to knit using a mirror—because “lefties knit, too.” She made sure my brother and I learned to play the piano, like all

We all need one cherished relative—someone who knows exactly what to say to you when things are spiraling out of control, who guides you through life’s stormy seas. For me, that person has always been my mother’s youngest brother, Uncle Jack.

From my earliest memories, Uncle Jack has been a steadfast figure in my life. When my childhood home was fraught with tumult and chaos, his house became my sanctuary. His children embraced me like a sister, and in that loving environment I always found solace.