‘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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