My Grandmother's Radio

My grandmother had a small blue radio she carried with her everywhere. It was older than her marriage. It had crossed rivers, survived a fire, been carried on the back of a donkey and once, briefly, on the roof of a bus. It played only two stations reliably, and both of them mostly played music from the era in which she had been young.

She listened to it while cooking, while sewing, while sitting in the shade of the veranda and disapproving of the traffic. When guests came she turned it down but not off, because she said a house without music was a house holding its breath.

In the last week of her life she asked me to bring the radio to the hospital. The nurses looked at me suspiciously when they saw it. They allowed it, in the end, on a low volume.