Memories

My grandma died this evening at 9:08 pm. She lived 17 years without my grandfather and at least 7 not entirely in her right mind. The last year or two, she really didn't know very much of what was going on. One of the last bits of information I learned about her was that she rode a motorcycle about six inches - just to say she'd done it. That's the kind of person she was.

I used to love going down to their home over Easter and Thanksgiving. Easter was fun cause it was warm and everything was blooming and we'd set up croquet in the backyard and play with Dad and Grandpa. Grandpa used to drive us down in his tractor to his mill and we'd play in the sand - looking for mica and fossils. He'd give us old receipt books from his business (that we loved because of the carbon paper) and we'd pick blackberries and play down by the creek bank. The creek powered his mill, back when it was running. The whole underside of the mill was exposed and you could see all the big machines that ran everything. The inside was creepy and old and unstable. He never let us walk around much because he was afraid we'd get hurt. There was no bathroom there, only an old outhouse.

Their house smelled good to me. In reality it was old and musty and smelled damp, but Grandma smelled like Windsong and lilacs and softsoap hand soap and Dove and Pantene, so the whole house smelled a little like that too. Faith and I always slept in 'the blue room' an addition to the original house. We'd sleep on a pullout sofa and stay up till all hours reading Readers Digest and National Geographic magazines. I loved all the fairy tale books. We played with Skipper dolls and little Legos and wooden blocks that rolled around in a little wooden wagon. Once we got to go into the attic and see my mom's old dollhouse and my grandfather's old war uniform. We played outside a lot, in the sandy dirt, amongst the flowers and in a huge old pine tree. I cried when the pine tree had to be cut down.

Grandma had hundreds of Harlequin romance books that Faith and I would flip through to find all the sex parts (just look for the really long paragraphs). She would watch Hee Haw in her room while Grandpa would watch Star Trek in the living room. If Star Trek ever got too scary, you could always just go back to Grandma's room. She'd sit back there and watch Hee Haw and study her Sunday School lessons or knit afghans and slippers. She always had a picture of Jimmy, their little boy who died when he was 12, on her dresser.

I loved waking up to the smell of bacon frying. Breakfasts were the best. Classic - bacon, eggs, toast, orange juice, cereal, if you wanted it, Eggo waffles, in which I'd put a little dab of syrup in each and every little square. Once I poured myself a huge bowl of grape nuts, not knowing what they were, and decided after one bite that they were disgusting. My mom told me I had to eat it all because I'd poured it, but the longer I sat there, the more the grape nuts grew. When my mom left the kitchen, Grandma took my bowl and threw the grape nuts in the trash can. When Mom asked if I'd eaten them, Grandma told her just not to worry about it. :)

Grandpa used to watch WWF wrestling. We did too, even though Mom didn't really like us to. We'd sit up in front of the TV and he'd tell us we made a better door than a window. He was pretty deaf, so he'd listen to the TV over a radio station with a hearing aid in his ear and the actual TV turned down. Silent WWF was pretty funny.

He and Grandma used to fight all the time because she'd say something to him and he either wouldn't respond because he didn't hear her (or at least pretended he hadn't) or he'd answer with something that made no sense whatsoever. She bought a whistle once, so she could call him in from the fields for lunch and he'd hear her. The first day she tried it, she blew and blew, but he never came. When he finally did come up to the house, hours later, she asked hadn't he heard the whistle?. He started laughing and replied that he'd wondered what strange sort of bird was making that sound.

He used to take us for rides in his tractor a lot. One time, when Faith and I were little, he drove around and around the same tree, making us laugh. Every time he drove us around after that, he'd do the same thing. At first we laughed just not to hurt his feelings, but then we laughed just because we thought it was funny that he still thought we thought driving around and around a tree was funny. He drove us out to the field to pick corn once. He always told us to be sitting down when the tractor started because it'd jerk at first. I decided this wasn't necessary and was narrating our adventures in my head when he started off. I feel backwards, out of the back of the wagon, scraping my legs along the back gate and landed on corn stalks. But, of course, Grandpa didn't know and couldn't hear my siblings yelling for him to stop. It hurt, but it made me laugh. I always sat down after that.

My grandma and I used to talk about everything. In the sleepy afternoons when everyone else was napping or reading, she and I would sit at the kitchen table and I'd tell her all my woes. She'd listen to them all, but she never let me complain about my mom. She told me, 'Your mother is my daughter and I can't listen to you say mean things about her.' So I never did. But it was nice to have a sympathetic ear about all my issues with my dad. :)

When my parents were dating and my dad met my grandparents for the first time, my grandpa went to bed early. His bedroom was upstairs on one side of the house and my grandma's bedroom was downstairs on the other side of the house. It was summer and all the windows were open. After a while my dad heard a growly noise coming from outside and became convinced that there was a bear lurking near. My mom and grandma just laughed because they knew it was my grandpa - snoring. Even with their bedrooms so far apart and their door closed, my grandma could still hear him snoring.

My grandma read a lot. She was always informed about the latest politics and newsworthy stories. She was witty and dry and sarcastic and played the charming southern belle with comments that were sweetly venomous to perfection. I loved sitting quietly in the kitchen corner when my grandma and her sister in law, Aunt Ruby, and my mom and Aunt Cindy would get together and go over all the latest gossip. Such scandalous stories! It was like something out of a movie - we could have all been wearing hoop skirts and fanning ourselves under parasols for all the conversation had changed.

Grandma's favorite things to tell about herself were that she had bright red, long hair. She road her horse, Suzy, bareback. She'd take a book and ride Suzy out to the fields and lie on her back and read and not come when her mother called. She won a car in a contest. She had my aunt right after her birthday. She liked flower, she liked to sew and knit, she collected paperweights, she sponsored many children overseas and kept all their letters. She never wanted to live north of the Mason Dixon line. Her father died when she was five and he fought in the Civil War. She had a string of nicknames that she could rattle off, but I forget what they all were now. Her real name was Mary Melissa.

The only people on her side of the family that are left are her niece her nephew in law and their daughter. I've never met my grandfather's family and my aunt never had any children. In a few days I'll get to see my grandfather's gravestone. I haven't been there since his funeral. I never got a last walk through of my grandparents house when my grandmother was moved up here. Molly was a baby and it takes a long time to get down there. We'd taken Molly down twice when she was little, to see my grandma before she moved. I wish I'd taken pictures of the house. I wish I had pictures of the mill and the creek and the woods and fields.

I hope they're all together now - Grandma and Grandpa and Jimmy. Aunt Ruby and Uncle Paul. All of them having a great big reunion in Heaven.