mother's mother

I've been thinking this week about my grandmother.  This is her season, after all.  She died eleven years ago on September 11th - our national day of mourning ("Oh, Mother, that is so like you!" said my aunt Marilyn, her daughter, laughing damply).  Grandma was born right in the middle of October, on Sweetest Day, that truly American holiday dreamed up by a Hallmark marketing guy to celebrate candy and cards and sell even more of them.  Or maybe it was meant pure-heartedly to brighten the lives of orphans and shut-ins (says Hallmark).  I think Grandma would like us to celebrate it as a day to remember her.  She loved being at the center of things and was brilliant at creating circles around her.  

She was a painter and potter and sculptor.  I remember her funny little figures, Cheer-ups, which sold the best: round-bodied birds and animals, pear-shaped people with comical faces.  I remember helping her set up her booth at the art fair.  "What is this one about?" I asked of a group she'd labelled Would You Believe? and she explained Nixon, corruption, and Watergate to me.  She explained everything I ever asked her -- and many things I never asked -- trait I appreciated less as a teenager.  I would not mind those explanations now and since her death have been grateful to have felt her presence from time to time -- a sense that she is just around the corner, her encouragement flowing towards me,

But still I was always drawn back to her orbit, the light she gave off, the energy with which she filled the room.  I remember standing beside her in the kitchen: slicing melon together and inhaling the ripe fragrance, chopping peppers ("When you are as old as I am you won't bother getting them so fiddly and small," she told me and so I still make a point to make my pieces of pepper even tinier.) I remember kneeling in the grass beside her, pulling weeds from her flower beds.  I remember sitting beside her at the potter's wheel, watching her hands shape bowls and vases, magically pulling them up out of a lump of clay.  It is her hands I especially remember:   how quickly they moved, all the things they made, braiding my hair, holding my hand as we walked to church, the smell of her rose-scented hand lotion when she came to visit.  Once when she was staying with us while our parents were away, I fell into a fever and began hallucinating, a terrifying alternate plane where my hands shrank and swelled horribly, wriggling into long noodly fingers then pulling back and plumping up into short stubby sausages. All night Grandma held my hands in hers to keep them the right size so I could sleep.

Her hands were always making things.  The pots and bowls and Cheerups. The sparkly red and golden apples she'd hang from ribbons in the tall window by the front door at Christmastime.  Peanut brittle made in the microwave (which she thought a wondrous invention and experimented cooking all kinds of things in it with varying degrees of success.) I loved the way her house smelled when we came to visit for Sunday dinner: sharp cheddar-green olive chicken tetrazzini if we were lucky, or for a week in the summer: huge bowls of fresh melon out on the picnic table for breakfast, or for rainy evenings when I was the only grandchild there: the coziness of canned soup (Progresso and, of course, warmed in the microwave) and big round English water biscuits with bleu cheese.  

I remember the murals she painted on her walls -- a heron in the bathroom, trees and leaves in the front hall, and in the children's room flowers and fairies - and the stained glass window of irises she made for the front door.  I was fascinated by the interesting pieces of driftwood she hung on the wall as if they were priceless pieces of art.  Her walls were also full of paintings -- her own and those of her painter friends. She collected kaleidoscopes and they lived on her shelves along with her pottery and Grandpa's blown glass. 

She loved hiking and laughing and telling people what to do and she wrote poems in the cards she sent me about how dear I was to her. She hated Star Wars (all those strange creatures!) and she loved Pretty in Pink whose DIY stylish spunk I think reminded her of her own scramble up and over from the wrong side of the track. She made even the mundane an adventure -- I love the memory of the time she decided we should go out to eat, on foot.  We walked above the city, along the mountain bench, and as a warm summer drizzle fell, Grandpa and she and I found our way to Long John Silver's (or was it Red Lobster?) and bowls of clam chowder that tasted so much more authentic than ever before or after. 

But I could tell and tell story after story about her and still she runs ahead.  Hers is the first face I expect to see on the other side. Her hand holding mine to show me around, introducing me to all the new friends she's made from the centuries of friends who never had a chance before to know her and family who probably missed her as sharply while she was living and they were gone on ahead as I do now.