Summers in Her Hands

Some people carry seasons inside them. My grandmother carried summer. Not the loud summer of crowded beaches and restless highways, but the soft kind—the one that tastes like ripe fruit, smells of drying laundry in the sun, and sounds like the quiet hum of someone you trust moving around the house.

When I was small, I used to believe my grandmother’s hands controlled the weather. They were always warm, always open, always ready to knead dough, bandage a scrape, or smooth the fear out of a trembling shoulder. Those hands held stories older than our family name. And every summer, when the air grew thick and slow, she used them to teach me how to live.

She never taught with instructions. She taught with rhythm.

The rhythm of slicing fruit for jam.
The rhythm of folding sheets as though the act itself were a prayer.
The rhythm of storytelling at dusk, when shadows grew long and memory softened into myth.

She taught me that summer was never a season, but a feeling—one you could carry even in winter if you tried hard enough.

What I didn’t understand then was how much work it takes to hold warmth. To be the person others return to. To be the one who softens a room simply by entering it. My grandmother was not gentle by accident. Her softness was earned, shaped by grief, stitched by choices.

She had known loss. She had outlived people she once believed she could not live without. When she spoke about them, her voice was steady, but her thumb rubbed the edge of her palm as though tracing their outlines in memory.

“The sun doesn’t warm you less after it sets,” she once said, eyes fixed on the horizon. “You just have to learn to carry the heat.”

At the time, I didn’t understand. I thought grief was a winter: cold, sharp, endless. I didn’t yet know that some griefs warm you—because they remind you of the love that came before them.

Every summer with her felt endless. The days stretched like bright threads waiting to be woven into something lasting. We walked barefoot through the garden. We picked berries until our palms were stained red. She taught me how to find shade, how to listen to wind, how to read the sky.

But her favorite lesson was this:

“Hold things lightly,” she said once, placing a ripe peach in my hands. “Grip them too hard and they bruise.”

I thought she was talking about fruit.
Later, I realized she was talking about people.

She held everyone lightly—never with possession, always with care. Her touch never demanded; it invited. Her warmth never insisted; it offered.

When I grew older, I understood how rare that is.

The last summer I had with her came too quickly, and yet it felt slower than any before it. Her hands were still warm, but the warmth flickered. Her steps were smaller, her breaths softer. She still told stories, but sometimes they wandered off into memories I didn’t recognize.

One afternoon, as sunlight spilled across her bed, she reached for my hand.

“You have my summer,” she whispered.

I wanted to ask what she meant. But something in her tone told me that answers were no longer her job to give. Some lessons you carry forward by living them.

She passed in early autumn, when the air was sharpening and the trees were beginning to release what they no longer needed. The world seemed off balance, as though the sun had dimmed a little.

But slowly, quietly, her warmth settled inside me.

I found her in small things—
in the smell of warm laundry,
in the taste of peaches,
in the late-afternoon hush where shadows soften.

I found her in the way I touched others.
In the way I listened.
In the way I tried, without always succeeding, to hold things lightly.

It took years to realize what she had given me:
not recipes, not stories, not skills—
but a way of being.

She taught me that warmth is a choice.
That gentleness is a strength.
That love is not proven by holding tightly, but by offering freely.

Most importantly, she taught me that the people who feel like summer live inside you long after they’re gone.

Their warmth doesn’t fade.
It becomes yours.

And now, when the world feels cold or grief comes back with its winter teeth, I close my eyes and picture her hands—steady, warm, sunlit—and I remember that summer was never outside me.

It was always in her hands,
and now it is in mine.