Preference.............................................................................................................Ari Child

Thank You, Pookie

One day in the warmth of early June, my grandmother and I visited the roadside arboretum of my hometown; we paced slowly (as she wasn’t walking so well, anymore) down its winding path amidst the trees. The trees that make up the forest are, for the most part, beautiful. Some of them were uniform, purposeful in their ascension towards the sunlight, while others sloped and wandered, weaving through the empty air, searching for the next patch of sunlight. However, many of the trees seemed completely out of place; imported or invasive, they clashed harshly against the scenery of the surrounding roadside forest. I distinctly remember a particularly ugly patch of bamboo we saw on our walk. My grandmother and I were laughing about our family's shortcomings and idiosyncrasies as we came up to the dense collection of panda food, and she suddenly stopped, mid-sentence, screeching her plod to a halt. She stared at the erected mass of green, hands on her thinning hips, slightly hunched with a face painted with perplexity for about 8 seconds of silence. She then stood up straight and asked the bamboo aloud: “What the hell are you doing here?” We turned and kept on down the path. Eventually, we got tired of looking at the carefully planted trees, and my grandmother’s malnourished legs needed their rest, so we searched for a place to sit down. We decided upon a well-shaded spot about 20 feet off the path that was shared with young, thirty-foot-tall common sugar maple. Pookie and I nestled our butts in the grass and took refreshing sips of water as the morning’s sun rose upwards towards noon.

Pookie is my grandmother, my father’s mother. She hates both of the aforementioned proper nouns, and finds being referred to by her first name condescending, so she decided long ago that Pookie was a good replacement. Pookie has lived in the same house as I for long as I’ve been alive. Our relationship is unique: an anomalous mixture between that of a parent, sibling, and close friend. She’s almost like a parent because in large part she has helped raise me. She’s baked my birthday cakes, given me scoldings and changed my diapers. She’s also like a sibling in many ways because we have a very close, playful relationship; we’ve always laughed and played games together when I was growing up and even now we still joke and tease. Yet we’re almost close friends because we lack the competition that siblings harbor for one another. Pookie and I are similar in many ways, and more than that, we understand each other well. She has brought me a great deal of pain, and an abundance of happiness. It’s strange how in my youth she took care of me,

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