This week has been a little tough for me. I’ve missed my grandma a lot. I always miss her on Saturdays. We spent nearly every Saturday morning
together. I’d clean and help her cook
and we’d talk about anything and everything.
Sometimes I’d draw. Sometimes we’d
play the organ together. Sometimes we’d just
sit and visit. Saturdays were our
days. She was one of the best friends and
mentors I’ve ever had. To this day, I feel the need to clean the
house every Saturday morning.
She wasn’t big on celebrating birthdays, and I don’t
remember ever doing much for her birthday besides having a nice meal or a
picnic but there’s something about dates and remembering people on their birthdays. If she hadn’t left us almost three years ago,
she would have been 97 six days ago.
I guess I’d always known it was coming, but I chose to
deny her departure. I remember a neighbor
lady visiting when I was down at her house one Saturday morning and Grandma had
told her friend that she hoped I’d never stop going down to her house. When I finished college, I was bound for
Kenya 10 days later, but I went down to her house every single day in
between. Her breathing had changed. I recognized it immediately. It was no longer the even, quiet rhythm of
someone who is well, but rather she drew in shorter raspier breaths. I didn’t want to admit that she was getting
old, that something was wrong and that she wouldn’t be around forever. That last day, she seemed like a little girl,
something so uncharacteristic of her proper and restrained self. She gave me a hug hurriedly and like a
childhood friend, eager to meet again exclaimed, “I hope the time hurries up
and you’re back in no time. I wish
December could get here right now.” I’d
never seen that part of her and I as left her house in tears, I couldn’t look
back, because I knew that she too was crying.
I think we both knew we wouldn’t meet again.
Now her stories and the memories we shared are all I
have left of her. Here are a few
anecdotes that I remember her by.
A Dream of Flower Children
Although she didn’t consider herself a dreamer or to
fantasize about things she did tell me a story of something she desired when
she was very young. She dreamed of
flower children, but not of the kind famous during the 1960s. As a young girl, Henrietta dreamed of one day
having six children (specifically daughters) and naming them each after
flowers. Some names included Pansy,
Daisy, Violet, and Lily. If I ever have
a daughter, I will give her the name of a flower, perhaps not one of the names
my grandma would have chosen, but a flower that we both loved.
Her Life Was Full of Music
Grandma loved music.
On Saturdays we would often sit down at the organ (and in her final
years at the keyboard) and she would play filling the house with music. She was very talented and could sit down and
expertly play any piece set before her. She
often played church hymns, but also enjoyed folk music. A favorite among her music books was a large
green song book published by Reader’s
Digest. She loved a song which began
with the lyrics, “How much is that Doggie in the Window?” In addition to playing music, she loved
listening to instrumental music and disliked country music claiming, “It sounds
sad.”
I heard a story about how she heard, “Hello Mrs.
Robinson” a few too many times before the record disappeared. She laughed about this story as she would
tell it years after the incident.
Grandma had the largest music box collection of any
person I’ve known. The ornamental song
boxes lined the top of the kitchen cupboards, covered an entire bookcase in the
sewing room, and decorated shelves and dressers in various other rooms throughout
the house. Grandma shared her love of
music with others by giving music boxes to many family members and friends as
gifts.
I Had No Vegetable Shelf
It’s a parent’s job to raise a child—teaching them
right from wrong as well as teaching them proper eating habits. It’s a grandparent’s job to spoil a
child. Grandma and Grandpa spoiled me,
especially when it came to food.
Grandpa always had tiny boxes of chewing gum in the
pockets of his overalls. He had an
enormous sweet tooth. It was for that
reason that they kept lemon drops in a decorative glass container on the
kitchen table. Most, if not all, of the
grandchildren appreciated the sweet treat.
Grandma understood that everyone has some kind of
food that he or she does not care for.
For her it was soup. For me it
was vegetables. She would say, “A person
knows what he likes. No one should have
to eat food that they don’t like.”
Sometime in early elementary school, I readily explained to Grandma that
the inside of my body was organized like a refrigerator. I insisted that my vegetable shelf was
missing, so I simply couldn’t eat them.
Grandma never protested and never asked me to eat canned vegetables. After all, she knew that I had “no vegetable
shelf.” After high school and spending a
year in Germany, I discovered that I like vegetables, just not canned
ones. When I told Grandma, she chuckled
and exclaimed, “So you finally found your vegetable shelf!”
Grandma’s Kitchen
Decorated with music boxes, magnets on the
refrigerator and grandchildren’s drawings taped to the walls, Grandma’s kitchen
always gave the feeling a being used but was still tidy. She always kept a jar of nuts by the door, a
bottle of honey on the table and cookies in a Tupperware container on top of
the refrigerator.
Grandma was a good cook. She didn’t have an extremely diverse array of
dishes that she prepared, but the things she did prepare, she made well. Calico corn was one of her specialties, as
were mashed potatoes. Few meals at her
house lacked potatoes. She could make
gravy and roasts as well. She satisfied
Grandpa’s sweet tooth with many baked goods—particularly her pumpkin pies,
chocolate chip cookies and angel food cake topped with whipped cream and
strawberries. No meal, or visit for that
matter, was ever complete without a glass of lemonade that she always kept on
hand.
Grandma was a good cook and patient teacher. We cooked and did the dishes together after
each meal. On numerous occasions she
told me how she had had a cousin with whom she sometimes washed the dishes as a
child. Whenever Henrietta , who was
drying the dishes, had pointed out that a piece of kitchenware or tableware was
unclean, she had been told that it was the dryer’s job to clean up those things
with the towel. That rule still stood decades later as one or
the other of us washed the dishes while the other dried them.
The Blue Chair
Many times when I stopped by Grandma’s house, I
would rap on the door once or twice, then hear the familiar, cheerful call from
the sitting room, “Come in!” I’d walk
in, take a handful of nuts from the jar that she always kept well-stocked next
to the entryway. I’d take a seat in the
living room. Maybe it’s because blue was
her favourite colour, or maybe it’s because she found comfort in routine, but
the light blue recliner was a very common place to find her.
As I’d sit, Grandma would put down whatever she was
reading (oftentimes Reader’s Digest)
on the small stand next to her chair, smooth her clothes, running her hands
across her lap to her knees as she’d lean forward and say, “Now tell me…what
news do you have for me?” I’d tell her
my news and she’d tell me hers. Often
she told of the progress of her flowers, of the latest birds or animals she’d
seen and of the books that she’d read.
Grandma loved to red
non-fiction books. Being practical and
valuing honesty, historical non-fiction was her preferred genre. Grandma’s desire for truth was a reason for
her to view novels as a waste of her time and to insist that children should
not be told of Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, because children should not be
deceived.
After discussing
many things, cooking, doing dishes, and eating, we would always return to the
living room where Grandma would adjust a small pillow as she settled back into
her pale blue recliner.
The Writer in the Family
I knew Grandma as a generous, though not an affectionate woman, who
aimed to please others. She liked to be
in the presence of others, but preferably very few people at a time! She was very good about communicating and keeping
in contact with family and friends by writing letters. I received letters nearly every two weeks
from Grandma, after I was no longer home and able to visit every Saturday. She always closed her letters with, “Love and
Hugs, Grandpa and Grandma B.” She was
kind, a great listener and soft spoken, yet was well understood through her
letters. I found the farewells of her
letters fitting, as each time I left, she gave me a hug and called, “Come
again!” as she did to everyone who walked out her door.
Like Clockwork
Grandma loved to have order in her life. She used to have me write inventory lists of
the items in her kitchen cupboards. The
house was always tidy. Everything had
its place. When it came to trips, visits
and visitors, plans were much better than surprises. We spent Saturdays together. On Sundays, Grandpa would go to church in
Thurston. On Fridays, they would go into
Wakefield and run their errands—Grandpa going to the band and farmers co-op,
while Grandma got her hair done at Pam From’s parlour and went to the Fairstore
where she always received a warm welcome from Charlie Sodeberg. I remember one Friday morning when people
even called home to ask if something was the matter, because she hadn’t shown
up at the Fairstore. They were concerned
because she was there every week “like clockwork.”
Laughter
Grandma didn’t have a loud, contagious laugh like some people do, but
when she found something funny her body language said so. Grandma had a soft chuckle—usually consisting
of two syllables while she raised her hands and brought them down to pat her
lap. Real “knee-slappers” as some might
say. Grandma’s sense of humor often
involved a play on words or silly things that happened and she did not tolerate
anything that she felt was mean in anyway.
Grandpa and I used to get Grandma all riled up as we teased one
another. She wanted none of it. In Grandpa’s final year, when he had a cane,
he was joking about chicken hooking me with it as he reached the cane across
the table to hook my neck. Grandma tried
to defend me, threatening to take away Grandpa’s cane. Grandpa and I laughed. Grandma didn’t want to, but eventually she did
too.
