Sandra Morris

At an awkward age—meaning some time in junior high—I asked my grandmother to teach me how to make the orange cake that was in endless supply in her refrigerator. I sat on a stool in her kitchen and she pulled a cup out of the cabinet, and eggs, and milk, and spoons from the drawer. I can see and feel everything about that day—the height of her counter, the apron she wore over a cotton housedress, the tang of fresh citrus oil as she grated the orange. She measured nothing precisely. 

My father tells the story of the day my grandmother passed. She was sitting up in bed in the hospital. Someone had brought her a pair of chandelier earrings. One moment she was shaking her head and watching the sparkle on the wall, laughing at their weight and the absurdity of wearing them while dressed in a hospital gown, and the next—she was gone. 

At some point after hearing that story, I realized that my grandmother had some other life before all of us, before my grandfather, before she raised her own children during the Great Depression, before she donned the cotton dress and apron, her daily uniform. And so, when I was told I could take something from the drawer where she kept costume jewelry, I laid my hands on this silver case—a proper container for a lady’s cigarettes. Likely hand-rolled. Likely snapped into a clutch bag, maybe to arrive at a dance or a club where she stood with her friends outside on the street, feet tapping out the rhythm of the bass pouring out the open door, her head tilted back like a movie star, her eyes squinting from the smoke, her heart pounding with nicotine-laced youth. The cigarette case dangling from its silver chain from her thin, unadorned wrist.

I used the case in college, for my own hand-rolled smokes, though no nicotine was involved. Oh, what this tiny case has seen; the places it’s been.