West in June

In June my grandmother and I drove west. She was eighty-one. She had a new red sweater and a small bag.

There was one road to the coast, and it went over a mountain. The journey was slow. There were sheep on the road, and we waited.

“Are you tired?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Drive.”

At the top of the mountain there were yellow flowers next to the road. We stopped and she picked three of them. “For the kitchen,” she said.

Then the road went down, and there was the sea. There was a small white boat on the water. My grandmother took off her shoes and walked onto the beach.

“I was here in 1962,” she said. “The sea was the same.”