Pirate Granny

I'm not sure exactly what has come over her.

She's wearing that blue, high-waisted dress she made herself over fifty years ago. No shoes. My tri-corner hat. Mum woke up early this morning to make blueberry pancakes, to find that Granny had gone pirate. She is hanging from the kitchen light, singing bawdy sailor songs from her youth, waving a yardstick like a cutlass.

I try to coax her down with the blueberries but she isn't having any of it.

"Surrender or Die!" she yells from the ceiling, pointing the yardstick menacingly at my face.
Obviously, the only rational way to fix the situation is to have a face-off. I run to my room and get my own sword. "All right, Gran!" I cry. "Let's get this settled! I win, you have to come down from there and have breakfast." We strike up a fierce tune of metal on wood, but for some reason, Granny's stick is doing better than my cheap Goodwill sword. What the heck? I mean, it's metal! It should be much more effective...

It turns out Granny is not actually holding a yardstick. Nor are we in the kitchen. A strong smell of salt air pours in when mum opens the window, followed by a huge gush of water. A wave knocks us over the bow and into the sea, and down, down we sink into deepening shades of grey-blue confusion...

Mum looks over at me in the growing haze and gurgles, "Whaaaat juuuusst haaaapeeenned?" I answer back, "Graaany muuust beee haaaviiing heeerrr seecooonnd chiiildhoood..." indeed, her dream-forces are strong enough to suck us both into her own imagined realm. With a force this strong in her old age, I wonder what her imagination must have been like when she was a child...

We emerge, coughing and spluttering, onto a bank of yellow grass.