Long Shadows

Most of Grandpa's hair had been trampled out by the ages. What was left huddled in nervous fringes around his ears and above the neck. This I noted anew that sultry July evening when the shadows were lengthening and I entered to find him in a wheelchair. He was poking around in the corners of the room, and he and the wheelchair literally vibrated with nervous energy. His ears were huge because all the rest of him had shrunk. Not until I called his name a third time did he wheel around to face me.
Grandpa's eyes were wider than an owl's. They made great red circles, each with dark, dried out, ball at the center. I detected not a glimmer in them.
"Are you somebody I used to know?" he asked.
I tried to tell him and I performed a dual task of examining his features. This reunion had been sixteen years in the making. I drank in the bald pate that ran into a sun-ravaged brow, scant eyebrows, prominent Dutch nose that hung like a decayed monument over a mouth drawn in by shrivelled tissues, wrapped on toothless gums.
Grandpa was ninety-eight. Since he had always tended to mumble I rarely understood all that he said. Because my voice is like his, and I think he was hard of hearing, you can imagine the conversations we had always had.
After an arduous time of it Grandpa finally conceded that I was one of his daughters' offspring. Which one, though, I am sure he had not a clue.
Grandpa talked, harkening back to earlier times.. I watched his once powerful hands grasping the rubber of the wheels. These hands had once wrested people's homes out of the raw materials dumped there by the old lumber yard. He sat a little straighter as he recounted days in the sun. Animated, smiling, he became the same Grandpa I knew. The dullness had left his eyes.
"I built x hundred houses." He looked around as though I were a whole group of listeners. "That was enough, wasn't it?"
He centered on things we would both remember. For that reason I think he might have had a glimmering who I actually was.
Eventually it had to end. He allowed me to hug him - hug a set of bones, really. They were the frame of a big human being. But the human being was slowly abandoning ship.
"See you Christmas," I promised.
"Bring the rest of the boys," he said eagerly, referring to my six brothers.
During the course of my visit he had seemed to drop thirty years. Now he was reluctant to turn back. I left him there, waiting for Christmas.