Kimberlee K.

I have a piece of bank stationery framed on my bedside table. It has a picture I drew on a family trip to Arkansas when I was 10. It’s a map of my great Aunt Evelyn’s property, with labels like “the bell”, “tree mania” and “the bug palace.”

It is a memory and trip I have held dear for most of my life, that includes small moments like my dad spilling an entire diet coke on Aunt Evelyn’s lap, my sister getting stung by a hornet inside our minivan, and me throwing up outside the state diamond mine—things we laugh about now, and perhaps served as early proof that even little disasters couldn’t prevent Arkansas from becoming a special place for me and my family.

Over a decade later, my mom, sister and I returned to visit Aunt Evelyn, and continued to until she passed.

On one of those trips, after she was moved into a nursing home and her house was deemed unlivable due to mold, we planned to stay with Jim and June, the latter of which had been a childhood friend of my mom’s mom, my Grammie.

“Are y’all giggling, or is that just the wind?” June said in her thick accent when we called her on our drive from the airport.

It was both.

And in every subsequent visit, the laughter and the sweeping southern wind would grow more and more addicting, more healing, more fulfilling. Whenever we left, we wanted to come back, wanted to map out when we could spend another weekend, a week. We grew familiar with the most rural parts of the Midwest state, the places that would raise the eyebrows of even the locals we met at the airport rental car counters. But when we got on the backroads and saw Jim and June’s house come into view, it felt like we were home.

“Do y’all want to go to Paris for dinner?” June said one night, waggling her eyebrows.

Paris, Arkansas, population 3,000.

“You gals are always watching your figures, ain’t ya?” Jim asked, watching us peruse the menu of their favorite restaurant.

“I’ve been watching mine,” June chimed in, “watching it grow and grow and twist and turn.”

Having lost Grammie in 2015, hanging out with June felt like getting a small piece of her back. She would recount the mischief they got into, occasionally raising her eyebrow and saying, “but we won’t talk about that.”

They were two people, it seemed, who would have been friends in any lifetime, and I took comfort in that, thinking it meant that we’d have this—these trips—in every lifetime too.

Jim and June became like a third set of grandparents for my sister and I, family we knew was wishing good things for us, even halfway across the country, and a home we knew we could visit whenever we wanted.

“Should we have cookies for dinner?” June often asked, opening the drawer next to her refrigerator that was stocked with Heath bars—that my sister got hooked on—Vienna Fingers—that I got hooked on—and popcorn—that my mom was hooked on.

One evening we drove to the local grocery store to pick up Bluebell ice cream, which isn’t available in California, and then begrudgingly drove through a Subway next door to have “real food” with our treats. There was only one employee trying to man both the counter and the drive-up window, and she said it would be few minutes. We didn’t want to block the drive thru, even though there was no one behind us, and we didn’t want to make the employee uncomfortable by sitting and staring at her, so we started doing laps around the building, descending into laughter with each rotation.

“Excuse me ma’am!” June shouted out the window as we drove by, “our ice cream is melting!!”

My mom had to pull into a parking spot for fear of crashing, I thought I was going to pee my pants in the back seat.

In the evenings, we’d sit in the living room and watch Jeopardy, shouting out answers that were almost always incorrect, and singing along to the catchy jingles of repetitive commercials. From June’s seat on the couch, she’d announce whenever the neighborhood kittens would stop by to drink some of the milk she left in a bowl on the porch.

“There are the babies!”

She’d rib Jim, who sat in his recliner, watching his shows with headphones on, sometimes getting his attention to say, “did you want to get up?” And he’d answer, “what?”

“Did you want to stand up a minute and tell everyone how much you love me?”

Jim would smile and shake his head, put his headphones back on and continue his show.

“He is obsessed with me,” June would say.

We never skipped a retelling of Jim’s story about opening the front door to a goat one evening—“he was just banging on the door with his horns”, or June giggling through a story that would make Jim roll his eyes—”you know the other day he was lying down the grass grower and he came running up the driveway saying, ‘the neighbor’s pig is chasing me!’”

When I look at the map of Aunt Evelyn’s house now, I can trace my finger off the page, knowing the main road out front curves and turns, looping slowly around to Jim and June’s old house. Part of me wishes we visited all those years ago, part of me is thankful everything happened when it did.

Last week, we found out June passed away, joining Jim up in heaven.

And while we are heartbroken, when my mom, sister and I made plans to go to the funeral in Arkansas, there was an undeniable giddiness shared between us to be back there.

Are y’all giggling, or is that just the wind?

When our plane touches down, I know it will be both, as we’ll be thinking about June, missing her, and Jim, and reveling in all the time we got to spend with them.

And while I know they’re gone, I like to picture them out to lunch or dinner at their favorite restaurant. The staff and the occasional friend stopping by the table, not wanting to miss the chance to say hello.

“Should we order margaritas?” June whispers across the table, raising a michevous eyebrow.