Tag Archives: childhood

An older woman showing flowers and a snail to a little girl against a blurry background of green trees

Summers with Mad Gran

An older woman showing flowers and a snail to a little girl against a blurry background of green trees
Photo by Sergiu Vălenaș

‘Everything is made out of language,’ Mad Gran said. She may as well have said everything is made from elastic bands, for all I understood. But I loved her, no matter how crazy she was, and I was happy to spend August afternoons in her garden drinking lemonade and watching the bees alight on the lavender flowers. 

We played a game like ‘I spy with my little eye,’ which normal children play with their normal grandmothers, only in ours I just named everything I saw. 

‘What about… lavender?’

‘Made out of language,’ she confirmed.

‘Bees?’

‘Yup.’

Lemonade, grass, orange flowers, pink flowers, green flowers, infinity flowers. Birds. Baby birds. Daddy birds. Gran birds. Worms. Dirt. Doggies. Poo. Me. Uncle Carlos. Mad Gran.

All made out of language.

In a moment of triumph I found the loophole. ‘Is language made of language?’

She nodded sagely. ‘It’s language all the way down.’

This made me grumpy. ‘I don’t get it,’ I admitted.

‘Of course you don’t,’ she said. ‘You can’t even read.’

I never got it, even after I learned to read, but the other day in a physics class I learned something that made me remember my summers with Mad Gran.

It turns out everything is made of elastic bands, each one a note thrumming with its own resonance, like a guitar string, plucked, like a word, spoken.

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The words

Goldfinch sitting on a teasel
Photo by Steve Harris

‘I know the words for everything there is,’ Zak boasted. Theo was walking home from school with him, as he did every day he didn’t have trumpet practice. Zak’s eyes were small marbles in his ruddy, pudgy face. They dared Theo to challenge him.

Theo’s mum said he should ignore Zak’s bragging, and that would make him stop doing it. But somehow Theo couldn’t manage it.

‘You know all the words for all the things?’ he said.

‘Yup.’

‘What’re those, then?’ He nodded toward the flock feeding noisily on teasel seeds at the derelict industrial site.

‘Them? Those are red-face birds,’ Zac proclaimed triumphantly.

‘Wrong!’ Theo said, though the sinking feeling in his gut told him he’d been bested, somehow. ‘They’re goldfinches.’

‘They’re still red-face birds,’ said Zak, ‘And I named ’em first, so I win.’

If that was the game, Theo realised, he was never going to win. He stayed quiet for the rest of the walk, willing himself to notice those things that had no words, that Zak could never name.