The day my grandfather's leukemia finally failed to respond to the glittery poison-cure coursing through his veins, my grandmother—former fashion model, ex-Naval intelligence officer, recovering alcoholic—gathered up all the thermometers on their farm. She carefully broke their metallic bulbs into a Mason jar that had once housed my grandfather's favored fig preserves and then called her chemist neighbor, insisting that he come at once with his lab kit. Upon his arrival, she told him nothing of her husband's death, but instead had him seal all the mercury in the Mason jar into a glass bubble. He blew this bubble using the farrier's forge in the barn in place of his accustomed Bunsen burner. My grandmother dismissed him and placed the vial of sparkling poison on a worn chain around her neck, then rose to take a shovel from the wall. Alone, my grandmother traipsed to the back pasture, to the mossy plot dotted by bleached headstones long since tipped over by cows. She clawed through a good three feet of Tennessee shale and then fired up the backhoe parked behind the barn to finish off the job. My grandfather was laid to rest in the early evening humidity in much the same fashion as he himself might have buried a favorite mare.
The next week, my grandmother bought a plane ticket west and set out to follow spring across the world. When Biloxi's riotous azaleas had faded, followed by Phoenix's neon cacti flowers, and finally San Francisco's demure daisies, she jumped a steamer across the Pacific. Hawaii's lush hibiscuses and New Zealand's exotic kiwi blooms did not move her, but orchids amidst the war rubble at Nagasaki finally made her cry. Still she continued her trek westward, visiting Moscow, Cairo, and finally Paris, where rain forced her to settle for a gallery of Monet's water lilies. When she returned across the big pond to Tennessee, having been gone nearly a year, she went out to the graveyard and knelt on my grandfather's grave. Then, just as another woman might break an egg against a mixing bowl, she cracked the necklace against his headstone and drank deeply, refreshed at the last.