home
archive
next
Public Service Announcement
February's Storyteller topic is up!
Momentary Thought
Seems like I'm always putting my worst foot forward when I'm trying to convince a collab to let me sign up. Dear WordGoddesses, please forget you ever saw my last entry, okay?
High/Low
High: The spa gets delivered today!
Low: I didn't sleep a wink last night, so I'm feelin' kinda poopy.
Current Obsession
Taking a nap.
Grin Source
Sherry, writing to tell me she wants me to move to Canada and become her personal chef. ~grin~
Singing
You are my
Forever love
And you are watching over me from up above
Josh Groban - "Where You Are"
A Year Ago
More or less
Two entries! Inner voices, and then more adventures with Michael.
Storyteller
Bio
Dramatis Personnae
Who I Read
Recipes
She's been gone for coming up on six months. I experienced loss when I was a child, when my mother passed away. But, perhaps due to my youth, I didn't feel the same degree of missing my mother the way I do my grandmother. There are little things that remind me of her every single day.
Strangely, my memory triggers whenever I section out a halved grapefruit. My grandmother used to cut one in half for me quite often for breakfast, cut out all of the little individual segments in their pockets to make it easier to scoop out, and serve it topped with a spoonful of sugar. As I was doing this the other morning for myself and Marie, the image of her standing in her kitchen, cutting away and humming to herself, was very vivid.
Some of her pots and cutlery made it to Arizona, too. I really don't have an idea of how they got here among my belongings - I think my ex-mother-in-law must have mistakenly packed them. One in particular is a white pot with a black handle. I remember specifically that she used to boil her egg in it every morning. Every blessed morning, a soft-boiled egg, a "nice" piece of rye toast, and a cup of sin-black coffee. Now I have the pot and think of her whenever I use it. She must have been in a swivet when she discovered it missing after I left, but she never mentioned it to me.
Conversations will trigger her memory, and I can hear in my mind her silly little chuckle. Car trips will call to mind the drives she and I would take, with her sister, to look at the changing leaves on the trees in the fall. Picture, if you will, a trip with my 75 year old grandmother and her 85 year old sister. I would be sitting in the back seat, and my great-aunt would start singing:
Great Aunt Peggy: "Oh Danny Boy, the pipes the pipes are caaaallling..."
So my grandmother would turn the radio on.
Grandma: big sigh
So my great-aunt would sing louder.
Great Aunt Peggy: "From glen to glen, and down the mountainside..."
So my grandmother would turn the radio up.
Grandma: "Peggy, will you stop your damned singing!"
It escalated to the point, every time, where they were out-and-out fighting.
Great Aunt Peggy: "I can sing if I want to!"
Grandma: "Not in my car you can't."
Great Aunt Peggy: "The summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying..."
Grandma (loudly): "Four score and seven years ago..."
Great Aunt Peggy: "Laura (that's Grandma, not me), cut it out!!!"
Grandma: "Don't you know any other songs?!?"
They'd continue on in stony silence for a while. Then my Great Aunt Peggy would start in on her annoying habit of reading every. single. sign. along the road. Just to annoy my grandmother, I'm sure. I can see the evil glint in her eye clearly in my mind:
Great Aunt Peggy: "State Route 1 - Scenic"
...pause...
Great Aunt Peggy: "Mike's Fish Shack"
...pause...
Great Aunt Peggy: "McDonald's - Over One Billion Served"
Grandma: "For God's sake, Peggy, do you have to read EVERY SIGN?!?"
Great Aunt Peggy: "I've got good eyes! You just wish your eyes were this good!"
And then there was her poetry. Sentiments (mostly religious) that came sincerely from her heart, but really pretty awful stuff:
Great Aunt Peggy: "Would anyone like to hear one of my poems?"
Grandma: "Nobody wants to hear any of your damned poetry, Peggy."
I learned to take headphones with me on those little trips. And they'd purposely schedule the "foliage ride" every single fall. Like childbirth, they'd forget the pain of the previous experience enough to want to do it again.
Great Aunt Peggy passed away back in 1995, and my grandmother was never the same after that. I think it's those arguments that kept her going, really.
What I wouldn't give for one more foliage ride. I'd even leave my headphones behind. And sing along... "But come you back when summer's in the meadow..." And Grandma would get all pissed, then her eyes would start squinting and she'd do her funny little chuckle (she can laugh at herself, and that's where I got it from), and she'd start singing, too.
I miss her. I miss them both.