It was in 2007. I am sure of it because she died a year later, in spring. This story happened in autumn. I am sure of it.

I know it was in autumn because the sky and roads would be dark as I drove home from class. I finished at six on Tuesdays. By five to seven, when she called, I would be – still – in rush hour traffic, somewhere near the fruit and vegetable store that stayed open 24/7.

It still does. And that winding, narrow strip of road is still as busy with cars cutting one another off, stopping for fruit, or trying; the store still has – ridiculously – only one parking spot. I still curse at the owner and myself for not taking another route.

Five to seven. My phone is silent. Of course it is. She’s dead. I check it from time to time, nonetheless, and the time, and that today is Tuesday. Thirteen years, apparently, is not long enough to shake certain habits.

Five to seven, just before the start of her favourite radio show. C’était hier still plays on Nostalgie, 88.0 FM. Radio, ironically, is not dead, not in cars at least, not yet. I turn it on. Every Tuesday, from seven to eight, listeners can text the name of an old French song to – I still remember – 1066. If they text early enough – say, five minutes before the show – they get to hear it played, just for them, on the radio.

A time capsule in the form of a jukebox you could text. Except Nana, who owned a mobile phone and could clearly make calls, as well as open and read a text message, refused to actually send one.

She claimed she did not know how and that she was too old to learn. She also claimed her eyesight was poor, her fingers too fat and slow. I never remarked that those very fingers could dance tangoes and waltzes on the piano, still in our living room, which now gathers frames and dust. Nor did I ever mention the notebooks I had found once in a drawer. Pages of poetry, in her looping “y”s and “g”s and slanted “l”s and fine “i”s capped with the lightest of dots. Her handwriting was like brushstrokes.

She had once let slip that she thought all this technology had killed romance. There was no music, she said, in words fired from screen to screen, like missiles, in the impersonal Helvetica font she found hideous. She preferred letters, whole sentences you could touch, knowing the reader could too, and might, and would then, almost, somehow, be touching you back.

She wrote letters she never sent. Or maybe she did. She had fine letter writing paper, cream with a thin golden frame. I do not know whom she wrote to. Certainly not my grandfather. He never expressed interest in romance, much less distress at its death.

Nor did he listen to songs on the radio, French or not. He had TV. Nana, however, always asked for the same one when she called.

Les feuilles mortes. The Fallen Leaves. Could I text 1066, please? If it was not too much bother. And could I hurry? The show was starting.

Sometimes her song would be the first one played. More often, the third or fourth; there were, after all, other nostalgics out there who texted faster. Once or twice, her song was not played at all. Eight arrived before its turn. She and I heard the news bulletin start on our separate radios.

I wanted to call her back on those nights, to apologize. I felt responsible for those few minutes she waited for. I did once. She assured me, too blithely to be sincere, that it didn’t matter, that it was just a song, that she would see me on Sunday.

“Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle. Les souvenirs et les regrets aussi.“

I still don’t know why she asked for that song, only that song, every week. I still cry when I hear it on the radio every Tuesday. My phone contains more than thirteen times fifty-two texts to the same number, repeating the same two words, Les feuilles mortes, like a poem.