The speaker remembers a great-grandmother surrounded by stories of quiet magic. She could supposedly charm warts away, and a relative credits her with restoring movement to a paralyzed leg. Even the landscape she came from seems touched by the strange: ball lightning rolling past her house. The poem keeps these claims at a careful distance with phrases like "they say" and "it is said," so we hear them as family legend rather than proven fact.
Then the poem shifts to what the speaker actually saw. The old woman sits in a wheelchair, wearing a party hat, eating low-sodium corn bread near a prison fence. It is a plain, even sad picture, set against the cold, silent drive and the funeral. Yet her endless smile changes the mood. The speaker doesn't explain it, but imagines it hides "beautiful secrets" she will never share. The ending feels tender and a little wistful, full of wonder and of loss.