awash in granules of light

By the end, she had a face like a French Bulldog. She enjoyed books about ikebana but never bought fresh flowers.  She hadn't talked to her son in three years, seven months, and fourteen days (their last conversation was about her physical and mental states and if they were sound enough to warrant a drive up Highway One to Big Sur; he'd said no, she, of course, felt otherwise).  Her wrists were the size of a toddler's.  Her favorite program was Wheel of Fortune (and that is what she called television shows, 'programs').  Buried in the back of a still-potent cedar closest was an old mink scarf that had its head and feet and tail but was conjoined in the midsection to the pieces of other countless minks giving this one the impression of being ran through a massive set of enormous rolling pins, flattening and stretching it out.  Her favorite colors were teal and fuchsia.  She drove a 1987 Lincoln TownCar and had a shoebox full of I Like Ike! campaign buttons on a shelf in her pantry, above cans of expired pumpkin pie filling.  She collected ceramic lizards and tiny-potted succulents and kept these things on sprawling display in a pine gazebo in the yard aside her kitchen.  Her hair looked like a gray palmetto and she always wore lipstick.  She liked to cook scallops in butter on the stove and kept bacon grease in a Folger's can on the counter.  She burped a lot.  She sang to birds. 

"She said she wanted to be cremated because she hated the thought of being eaten by worms."

Halos of light sang from the sconces.  Grim, grave old men in dark suits folded their hands in front of them because that is what old men are supposed to do in these situations.

"She would have hated these drab flowers."

The rug's paisley flourishes curled around folding-chair legs.  Middle-aged women in well-worn polyester dresses embraced each other and picked lint balls from one another's clothes, like chimpanzees de-licing their kin beneath the shade of a zoo-stunted sycamore.

"She thought of you often and hated how long it had been since you two talked."

A tiny, almost translucent, spider tip-toed its way up to the crown molding on the wall opposite the round-top window.  Boxes of Kleenex printed with a pastel country sunrise sat atop scattered cherrywood telephone tables, apparently bought for only this purpose.

"She had dreamt repeatedly since her youth of owning an orange grove; she loved saying how each tree produced the bounty of a hundred tiny suns.  I had told her that sounded so ridiculous, and it still does."

And the sound of melancholic organ chords and throats clearing.  And the inexplicable smell of fertilizer.    And the thought of thousands of individual zeniths zephyring through all the ends of almost all the days.