The Last Letter to Grandma Marta
Grandma Marta,
today I smelled burning wood.
It was enough to bring the whole house back.
The wooden walls. The blue window. Smoke in the first sunlight. You before the stove, your hands taming the fire.
I always believed that house had a heart.
It was the stove.
It never went out.
The abundance of the flames contrasted with the scarcity of the food. If there was so little in the pot, why so much fire?
Only years later did I understand:
as long as there was fire, there was hope.
With so little, you did so much.
Poverty was not merely absence.
It was measure.
Sharing before there was not enough.
Saving today for tomorrow's hunger.
A child does not know the size of poverty when someone is trying to hide it.
Poverty took much from us, Grandma, but childhood gave it all back.
Perhaps that is why my memories of that kitchen carry more scent than hunger.
In your hands, what little there was changed its name.
Baião de dois.
Capitão.
If childhood has a flavor, for me it has that name.
Capitão was never merely food.
It was what was in the pot becoming something that fit in a child's hand.
No two were alike.
Each carried the marks of your palm, the grooves of your fingers.
I believed each Capitão carried a piece of your heart.
I was only wrong about what happens to a heart when it is shared.
Yours did not grow smaller.
It grew.
During the week, work stole my parents from me.
On Sunday, your food gave them back.
Perhaps that was one of your greatest miracles:
turning exhaustion back into people.
Beside the stove was the blue window.
I believed God looked through it to watch you cook.
I never imagined God on a throne.
The God of my childhood stayed at Grandma Marta's window, smelling the beans.
It took me many years to learn to read your writing.
You wrote with your hands.
The house disappeared.
The stove went out.
The blue window is no longer there.
You left us in 1993.
But something refused to disappear.
All it takes is the smell of burning wood,
a pot of beans,
a little flour,
and everything finds its way back.
The walls rise again.
The smoke dances in the light.
My parents laugh again.
God looks through the window.
And I become a child again.
When you place the next Capitão in my hand,
I will no longer be afraid that I am eating a piece of your heart.
Today I know that I am.
And perhaps that is precisely why
it is still beating inside me.
Your grandson.
Copyright © Alexander da Silva Lima | Year Posted 2026
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