Every year I visit my grandmother.
She’s spry, adventurous, but I am out of shape,
heavy under the weight of not-so-subtle comments
on the extra weight fat around my thighs and stomach.
I come because I want to know her.
I want to learn from the push and pull of muscles
why it is that my grandmother works so hard.
She is insane with ambition to be healthy.
She eggs me on as we ride the Katy Trail
with stories from Vietnam,
family I never meet and
the thousands of miles that she spent on cross-country bike tours.
My grandma is the type that closely reads the nutrition labels.
She doesn’t know the taste of a double cheese burger.
She tries to set a good example
by dragging me five hundred miles across Missouri,
but I am disoriented half an hour in.
Her breath is calm and steady.
My resurrected muscles ache.
The one hundred degree heat makes the air heavy.
When I find a moment to sit with my notebook
there’s not enough breath in me.
My grandma carries on.
Her voice echoes down the trail,
“Exercise is the cure to depression, the key to longevity.”
I stare at a blank notebook page
and write the only thing I can manage to think,
“Exercise is the cure to depression, the key to longevity.”
As I write, the words wash over me like strength.
One day, when we’re both gone in spite of these long jogs,
these words will live
and in them, this piece of me will still exist.
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