Saying goodbye to my grandmother

Just a rambling post while I process some moments of grief.

I used to stay with Mama T in the summer. She lived on the banks of a river and just below a dam. When the river was down, I could play with some neighborhood girls in the river. But today I'm remembering moments when the river had been up pretty high, usually after a good hard rain. Mama T and I would walk along the banks of the river, searching for treasures. Treasures came in all kind of forms, old bottles, interesting shells, all sort of things.

She was a very easy going grandmother. She let us go skinny dipping (which didn't last very long because we got nervous because of the cows watching us). She let us stay up late and I learned about watching Johnny Carson with her. She had a game show addiction and we watched a lot of game shows together. She taught me how to play Solitaire and how to do massages.

She couldn't cook. I never knew anyone could ruin Kraft Mac & cheese like she did. She was not a domestic goddess, which explains my genetic ineptness for housework.

For a girl from a small town, she got to go to Okinawa and Japan. She lived all over the country, Maryland, Arizona, California and of course all over Texas.

Another great memory was her love of pulling over on the side of the road to read historical markers. A 20 minute drive to a grocery store could take over an hour if she knew of some markers for me to read. I need to find time with my kids to teach them about reading markers.

She loved birds and squirrels and had little places for them all over the yard. It didn't matter to her that the squirrels were destructive little rodents, she still loved them. And she had her mother's love of flower beds and you never knew where a flower bed would suddenly spring up or what would become a flower pot.

One of my very favorite memories was when my family was about to move to a new city. As things were being moved, I suddenly realized that I was about to be exposed for hiding the things I couldn't eat behind the deep freeze that had been in the dining room. I began to cry and she came to console me. I confessed to her and she said she would take care of it. She pulled out the deep freeze and together we disposed of the evidence (which wasn't as much as I thought it would be). Years later, when my statute of limitations was over, at a family get together, I told the story. My aunt was furious because when the same woman (my grandmother, her mother) had found out the same thing about my aunt, she made my aunt eat the food and my aunt was upset that I hadn't been punished like she had. My grandmother just smiled and said that was the difference of a mother vs a grandmother.

Over the years, I wasn't as close to her. I went from being her first grandchild and a favorite to some other cousins becoming the center of her world. I have watched those cousins take and take from her and continued to feel hurt that they could do that to her and she could still love them blindly. Her obsessive Christian thoughts made me uncomfortable. I let those things get in the way of letting my kids get to know her better.

I still have some time left with my grandfather and I will try to make up for lost time. He is an amazing man and I want them to know that. And someday when I'm a grandmother I will try to be like her in some ways and not like her in others.