Thoughts of Grandma

 
Thoughts of Grandma, 2:55 am September 2, 2011




She never did get the chance to come up to my new house in Utah, but as I look around, I see signs of her everywhere. The painting that she made in college many years ago of Mt. Timpanogas hangs above my computer where I type this. I see the book of family history that she compiled and wrote, the culmination of many years of investigation and work. A postcard that she sent from Death Valley in February is on my refrigerator. Even though her handwriting is a little shakier than it used to be, it is still neat and beautiful cursive that says “A strange, beautiful, and interesting area to visit. I love you all. Gram”. Maybe most telling of all is the envelope that is in my inbox with a birthday card, and a check for $35 dollars in it…a birthday gift that she sent 2 months early, just in case, knowing that her body was wearing out finally.



I received the call from my mom about 45 minutes ago, when I was deep in sleep… Grandma passed away. Although I knew this call would come, all I feel at first is disbelief. A world without my Grandma in it just doesn’t seem possible. I lay in bed for awhile trying to process it, and my head is swimming with things that I want to remember. So I am here, typing away and letting the tears flow as I write and think of her.



I have been told that we are alike in many ways. I think that she is much classier, of course but I do think that my love and admiration for the beauty that is everywhere comes from her.  I like to think that I am like her. 



Many years ago, when I was a (young) teenager, my grandma was distributing most of her treasured things among her grandkids. She had the china cabinet full of sparkling crystal and china sets, and the table had various pieces of silver and jewelry, and a few other things passed down from her mother, and her painting. One by one, and in age order the grandkids picked an item. I immediately loved the painting… an impressionistic landscape of rural Utah, with the mountain glowing violet at the peak of the deep blue mountain. There are trees scattered about on the landscape in the foreground, and fields of pale green and gold, with a dirt road winding off into the distance. Utah in the spring, at sunset. I know the scene especially well now because I live here, and ski on the back side of that same mountain in the winter. When my turn to select something came, I felt really lucky to pick the painting. It was fitting, I thought, not just because it was beautiful, but because she was the one who taught me as a kid how to paint mountains, and how as the mountains recede behind one another they fade from vivid colors to purple. The painting has brought me much more happiness than any china ever could, because love of art was one of her gifts to me.



Some things will forever remind me of her, like the taste of a fresh sugar snap pea, picked from the garden in the summer. I loved helping her in her garden as a kid, and she would let us kids pick and eat as many peas as we wanted. It was funny, because as any of my family could tell you, I loathed peas. But hers were totally different from the sad, shriveled peas in a can. I never knew that peas could taste good. It is still really the only way that I eat peas. She liked to tell the story of how I hated peas so much that I wouldn’t swallow them, and one morning my mother came to wake me up, I had a mouthful of green mush that had been my peas from the night before. So she let me eat her snap peas.



The reminders go on as I walk around my house. There is the book that is on my nightstand, which when I went on a visit to her house in St. George about a year ago she had the exact book lying with bookmark in place on her nightstand. What are the chances that we would both be reading the very same edition of “Great American Short Stories” before bed at night at the same time?



In my garden, the Siberian Irises are doing well. I was surprised that they bloomed earlier in the summer after being dug out of my garden in Maryland in the fall, put in a trash bag and making a 4 day journey in a moving truck across the country. They sat for a few more days then Andy was able to plant them in the garden, until I arrived at our new home a few weeks later and moved them yet again to a place where they were less likely to be stepped on. The plant began its life decades earlier, probably around the time that my father and uncle were born. My grandma planted it in what she later told me was a rental house in Riverdale, or across from University Park and then she moved a cutting to her College Park house where it lived happily for many years. I always admired the Irises, so when I had my own yard to take care of next door in College Park, I took a chunk which really thrived. I wanted to keep it going in Utah, and I am so glad that it can remind me of Grandma every early summer when the beautiful blue flowers are in bloom. She always had a beautiful garden, and still does in St. George.



Other memories:



Cowboy cookies

Vanilla/ orange sherbet mix

No tv, because she always had other more fun or educational choices

Making gingerbread cookies every Christmas time

Her homemade pickles on thanksgiving

Road trips

Amish country with shoo fly pie, apple fritters and picnicking at the old church with the hand pump out back.

Sandy Spring

Flash cards

My image of her in her older years is standing on a red rock overlooking the beautiful Snow Canyon.



Her sleeping under the stars on camping trips





It feels good to write this. As long as her stories are alive, so is she. I feel like I have so much to learn from her still, and of course I have regrets of questions that I never got to ask, and letters that I never sent. Hopefully though, she knows that I will always remember her and will pass her stories on to another generation who will feel blessed to be her ancestors. I know I am.

(photo: reading a story to Karen and my kids, Sydney shown.  December 2010)