I'd Be Running Up That Road, Be Running Up That Hill. . . .

While napping yesterday afternoon, I dreamed that while talking with Mom in her kitchen, I mentioned missing being able to write letters to Grammy and how I always ache when I see pink things in the stores that look like something she'd love.  "You can write to her or send her anything you want," Mom responded, clearly puzzled.  "She loves hearing from you." It didn't feel at all like a dream, our interaction and the setting were so realistic.  I goggled at her a few moments before telling her I didn't understand.  What was wrong with Mom neurologically now, I wondered, just as I would in real life, that she didn't remember that her own mother has died?  She looked back at me with what was probably an expression identical to mine until I finally explained, "Mom--Grammy died.  Or. . .I thought she died. . . ?"  She looked both pained to hear me say that and relieved to understand finally why I had been so baffled.  I spelled out for her that I had thought--wrongly, it was turning out--that Grammy had died last January, we had all gone to her service in New York, and I had even spoken at it.  I told her I could share more details but that I didn't want to hurt her.  She said, sounding just how she would in real life, that it hurt her more to find out that I had thought Grammy had been gone going on two years and that I hadn't been in touch with her in all that time.  None of it even happened, I realized, a thrill of horror and gratitude sweeping over me:  Grammy is still alive!  Sommer's cousin isn't on a ventilator post-Covid!  Stuffed is still here with us!  Mikes' mom didn't have a stroke!  It was all a dream!  All the other losses of 2020 and 2021 were just bad dreams!  I started to cry from the incredible relief of it, and I woke up then for real, and really in tears.  Mom called a couple hours later to tell me that one of my cousins has a brain tumor.  January 2020-onward:  And so it goes. 

I pray and rest and appreciate beauty and keep in touch and listen to music and walk and work and cook good food and try to write and try to read, but life has felt more rough-patch-ish than not for so very long now--and for so many of us.  I told Mike the other day that although I don't feel like I can focus enough to write very well the past couple years and can't concentrate long enough to read as voraciously as I did before either, I need to keep trying.  It will be creativity that saves me this time, just as it has so many times before.  Bear with me, then, as I try to find the words to tell the stories.  It's been a long hard slog that has almost muted me, but I will keep trying.  

I will keep trying. 

With Gingham and Gratitude

A few hours after I wrote that last post, my grandmother fell and struck her head and has since passed away, the last of my grandparents and the one who has always been too big for me to be able to write about.  Dear Grammy.  ♥

Unresponsive after the fall, Grammy survived more than another week, while the rest of us waited and wondered if today would be The Day.  Yes, we were told, it will be today, then today would become tomorrow, and Grammy was still with us, but no, now they say certainly sometime tonight, but then a new day would dawn, and now they're sure it will be in the wee hours of the morning, but no, another night and day would pass.  'So touch-and-go, but I took quite a gamble and ordered a teddy bear one afternoon for next-day delivery to the hospital.  My uncle opened the box and quickly placed the bear into her arms, my family texted me, and my aunt rubbed its fur against Gram so she could feel how soft it was.  Grammy passed just a few hours later. 

Just as I felt when Sommer died and when my paternal grandfather died, I remain shocked that such a big personality could somehow no longer be here with us.  Surely, someone larger than life is larger than death too?  Some part of the heart will never understand.

I began writing what would become a eulogy on New Year's Eve--such were the holidays this year--and I was determined from the start to read it at her service, shyness be damned.  And last week, standing in front of everyone at the funeral home wearing a pink gingham skirt Grammy would have raced me across the store in her walker to beat me to, I did just that, my voice only breaking on the very last word.  I was nauseous with dread while waiting for the pastor, my uncle, and my aunt to finish speaking, but as soon as I began walking to the podium, I felt a calm come over me and I knew I'd be okay.  I'm prouder of the fact that I not only managed to do this, but also that I did it well--I received many compliments on both my writing and my delivery--than of anything else I've done so far in my life; it means that much to me and was that hard for me to do.  And Grammy would have understood that and would have been pumping her fists in the air for her quiet granddaughter with every finished sentence and section from me, I know.

This is what I said:

When someone close to me died years ago, Grammy told me, "Write!  Write!  It will help ease the pain of the loss."   I've been taking her advice the past couple weeks, and this is some of what I've written so far. 

My earliest memory is actually of Grammy.  She is in the kitchen with me asking me if I'm excited about turning four.  I've always loved that my first memory is of a grandparent--and of a grandparent asking if I'm excited about something. . .what a celebratory note to begin on, you know?  :)  And how apt that it was Grammy asking me if I was excited, because we all know that Grammy could make things exciting--for better or worse, right?!  :)  Excitement to me as a four-year-old with Grammy meant that when she helped Mom make my breakfast, she'd slice my toast on the diagonal and call it "party toast."  We both liked Nabisco Nilla Wafers and would eat them together.  She made a brown velvet coat and hat set for one of my dolls, and she made a beige shawl for one too.  I still have all the clothes.  

Well, I turned four in the spring of 1981, and as many of you here remember, those were the days of the big family badminton tournaments in my parents' yard.   Grammy loved to tell the story of how during one especially spirited game, she landed badly and broke her ankle, and as my dad and various relatives made a little "arm chair" and carried her off the court--"the court!"  :)--my Italian great-grandmother who lived next door to us at the time muttered as Gram was carried past, "Crazy woman!!"  :)  Grammy loved that story; she thought it was a hoot and told the story with pride.  "Crazy woman!"  :) 

I once showed her a Peanuts cartoon I had clipped from the newspaper.  It depicted Charlie Brown in bed with thought balloons all around him, and the thought balloons were a repeated image of the little red-haired girl--his long-time crush, you know--asking HIM to dance.  The word balloon above Charlie Brown's head read, "Sometimes it's nice just to lie in bed at night and remember something good that's happened to you."  Grammy loved that.  "Oh, VAL!  Isn't that WONDERFUL!"  She loved it.  I think of Grammy and all my grandparents as some of the "something goods" in my own life, but Grammy was one of a kind.  I remember telling my best friend in high school that I couldn't really describe Grammy--She'd just have to meet her.  Grammy was too big to put into words, really, but here are a few I've come up with so far, just bullet points of things about her that make me happy or that instantly say "Grammy" to me:

•  hats, overalls, scarves, denim, and the colors beige, tan, pink, gray, and olive green
• pink legal pad paper
• pink Geraniums
• gifts wrapped in white tissue paper--I never saw Grammy use wrapping paper; It was always white tissue, and her gifts were beautiful.
• her spindly handwriting
• raspberry squares
• chocolate brownies with black walnuts
• baked beans at family picnics
• the smell of strong coffee
• Rod Stewart's song "Forever Young"--because Grammy told me once that a friend of hers once told her that every time he heard it, he thought of her.  Every time I've heard it since she told me that, I've thought of her too.
• the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"--because Mom's always said it was one of Grammy's favorite songs
• Grammy liked pretty things, and especially pretty pink things:  Pink lemonade, pink hard candy, and even pink salad dressing.  I remember one visit as a kid. . .seeing a glass jar on her counter with pale pink watermelon candy in it and thinking, "Wow!  How great to be an adult!  You even get to have pink CANDY!"  It was enchanting to me.  And then I found raspberry vinaigrette dressing in her fridge, pale pink dressing in a bottle, and asked her, "Do you even LIKE all these flavors, or do you just like having pink groceries?!"  :)  (Gram assured me she really liked them all.)  :)  
• She liked Winnie the Pooh.  And like Pooh, when she got hungry, she was known to say, "'Time to get a little smackerel of somethin.'"  
• And finally, in a story I almost can't believe I'm going to share in front of the Reverend. . .Jim Palmer, the hunky baseball player from the 70s and 80s--He used to do ads for Jockey underwear.  As he got older, he did endorsements for mortgages and home equity blah-blah--drier things, right--and one day when one of the more boring Jim Palmer commercials came on TV, Grammy shocked my teenage self by saying, "I like ya a lot, Jim Palmer.  But I like ya a lot better when you're in your underwear!"  :)  She was one of a kind.

My best friend in high school didn't get to meet Grammy.  She died a few months before our high school graduation.   Grammy sent me a card a few days after she learned of Sommer's death--and many of you know how perfect Grammy's cards always were.  She had the knack of finding the PERFECT card with the PERFECT illustration and the PERFECT verse, and this one was no different.  The outside showed a dark-haired girl in a dress, tights, and black Mary Jane shoes with her head bowed, and it read:  "Endure.  Keep yourself for days of happiness."  I'm actually going to wrap up what I want to say here today by sharing with you what Grammy wrote to me inside the card.  I thought of it over New Year's and dug it out, knowing it would be as perfect now as it was back then.  In Grammy's words, then:

"Dear, dear Val--

How I ache for you today, I can think of little else.  Looked so forward to meeting Sommer.  Life is so hard and it's okay to yell, 'It's not fair.'

You know, Val, Nana used to say, 'Just be happy for that part of your life and what this person brought into your life--and you into hers.'  I understand you can't handle the memories now.  Guess I've never understood how a loving God could cause so much heartache and I personally have questioned him many times!

Just remember that every person in the world is a dream of God.  Life is a gift, day in and day out.  There is a quote I like from Golda Meir:  'Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.'  

Remember that I love you beyond all reason.

Gram."

A fellow granddaughter sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" a cappella to conclude Grammy's funeral.  Unbeknownst to me, she had told her mom the week before that she was going to sing it, and sometime soon after she did, I texted her mom to ask if my cousin would be willing and able to sing, and I suggested "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."  My aunt loved that her daughter had came up with it on her own.  My cousin sang beautifully.  She is a local theater director, so her talent and composure were not surprising, but I think we all were remembering as we watched her how she used to put on pretend concerts on Grammy's front porch as a six-year-old, with Grammy's honey dipper as a microphone.  Just as I had held it together until my voice broke on my last word, she got through the song perfectly but then collapsed into sobs in her mom's arms as soon as she stepped away from the podium.  But we did it.  She and I were also the only ones who decided to wear pink gingham to the service--Grammy also loved pink gingham--so when we first saw each other's outfits, we laughed in surprise and delight.  'So wondrous how these little things align.  "Mom would be so proud of her gingham girls," my mom told us before we left the funeral home.  And she truly would.  I'm sure she IS.  ♥ 

Aunt Laurie and I were roommates at the hotel last week, and before we went to bed the night of the funeral, I sat at the desk writing in my journal while she finished packing her luggage for the return trip home.  One of the things that crossed my mind was that I hadn't seen a heart that day.  I had really thought I would.  I'd found a heart on the floor at work the week before,

had found one reflected in a stack of clean dishes I had put away before heading home for the funeral trip, 

and I had spotted another--a breadcrumb heart--on my plate at the family supper just the evening before,

but none of them were really the best heart, you know, and I was just surprised there hadn't been a more obvious one that day.  I didn't say anything about it, it was just one of a million things on my mind, and soon, I too was getting ready to climb into bed.  As Aunt Laurie folded up her coat to place it on the top of her now-tidy stack of luggage, she pulled something out of one of its pockets and laughed.  "I never know what I'll find in my pockets," she said and walked over to me holding out the whatever-it-was.  "I have no idea where this came from, but you can have it, Valerie."  And into my hand--chills!--she slipped a folded white paper heart.  

I went to bed having been given my heart after all, then--!--and hours later was in the car again heading home--with my pink gingham skirt packed away and Grammy's new bear now tucked in beside me. 

"When you finally fly away," Rod Stewart sings, "I'll be hoping that I served you well."  And Grammy has, and I think I did.   And I am, indeed, grateful for it all.  

36

I turn thirty-six years old today.  I am the rare soul who loves to grow older.  I've loved my thirties and can't wait to be forty and have been saying since I was a kid, "Can you imagine being eighty or ninety someday!?  Knowing everything you'll know by that point and having learned that much and experienced that much and finally being able to see how so many of the pieces and story-lines of your life all fit together?!  Wow!"  Wow, indeed.  My older brother will be forty in February and has long been lamenting his "advanced" age, but I myself love it. 

We all had a sweet visit over the weekend.  My mom loved her paper dolls, yes.  As predicted, right after the "Oh my gosh!" and "Vally, how did you FIND this?!" came "There's IDA!  Oh, I remember her!  I always remembered there was an Ida with dark hair pulled up on top!"  :)  My younger brother and his wife announced that they're expecting their first baby in November.  Aunt Laurie and I sat at the dining room table with mugs of hot chocolate Sunday night and looked through a stack of old Country Living magazines that Mom had found at the flea market the day before.  Mom made my traditional birthday cheesecake (made with lemon gelatin) and wrapped my gifts in a pink polka dot paper.  (My brothers groan and make fun of me because I take so long to unwrap presents, but I admire the gift wraps and bows and cards so much and always save a scrap of each wrapping paper from birthdays and Christmas.  They thought and hoped I could open my gifts during the twenty-minute intermission during the hockey game they were watching Sunday, but alas, no, so they turned on the radio to listen to the next period while I finished.  ["Brothers."  :)])  My older brother gave me my traditional birthday bag of rhubarb from his garden.  My uncle showed me his new camera.  My cousin Mark and I caught up and watched a couple shows on the Food network.  My dad and I laughed at the fact that Mom is all excited about the "new" shade of blue she and Dad have been repainting the house this past week even though it's looked to the rest of us like the exact same blue since 1978.  My nephew regaled us with sports trivia, and my niece's ever-growing refrigerator collection of grinning cat drawings--each one labeled "HELLO KITTY!"--still has me and Mike giggling.  

I'm not 100% yet but am feeling much better.  Thank you.  ♥  I hadn't been sick since around New Year's, so that was a great good-health streak for me.  And I have a few more days to rest before returning to work, so this should be a restorative week.  

Last year's rainbow birthday cake took forever to make, although it was so fun and cheerful, it was worth it to me, but I needed rest more than rainbows this time around, so tonight's dessert for me and Mike was two slices of carrot cake from a local coffee shop.  

And especially since I never found pink Tulips for Easter or my beloved Daffodils at all this spring, I treated myself to a small bouquet of orange Tulips this afternoon.  It rained here almost all day, so orange was the way to go today.  Here's to another year of trying to shine brighter and to be better and wiser and kinder, both to self and others.  Here's to thirty-six.  ♥

Fall Leaves and Frog Stickers: My Pen Pal, Aunt Laurie

My sweet aunt Laurie is one of my favorite people, and she and I have been exchanging cards, letters, and other little "love notes" through the mail since I was a kid. The photo above is of our November correspondence from last year--she always makes collages and includes them with her letters, and I pass along pretty fall leaves that I know she'll appreciate. Her Halloween card, collage, and letter in response to my own arrived in Monday's mail, and although I just saw her in July for my brother's wedding, her words made me miss her even more than I already did. I have been missing my family a lot lately, as I had told her in my letter, and I wish I could be in at least three places at once. "I'd love to just appear at your door and offer some dinner and hugs," she wrote in Monday's letter. "'Sending hugs through the mail."

When my best friend died in 1995, Aunt Laurie was having a traumatic week of her own with one of her children, and I sent her a card a couple days after my friend's death to check in with her and to send love to my cousin. "Oh how I wish I could hold you and tell you everything will be okay," her letter back began. It is one of the things I remember verbatim from the haze of those first few weeks without my friend.

Knowing how I love holidays and seasonal meals, Aunt Laurie added an illustration to her Christmas letter's collage a few years ago of a woman studying a cookbook titled 10 Festive Meals You Can Make with Canned Peas. It still makes me laugh. :)

Aunt Laurie's a lover of all things Victorian, lacy, and pretty.

She writes poetry, loves to take nature walks and sew, and makes amazing Civil War reenactment costumes.

She is more than a little psychic and has amazingly vivid spiritual dreams. The pictures she takes often have orbs of light in them.  

She is soft-spoken--a bit Jackie Kennedy-ish--speaks slowly, and has a way of seemingly moving in slow motion, as well.  Her handwriting has the same almost-fragile quality. She has gentle brown "doe eyes" but can only be pushed so far before proving she's tougher than she appears.

She likes peanut butter and doesn't like chocolate. She sometimes drinks tea but adores coffee. She loves doughnuts but tries not to eat them since my uncle is always watching his weight and is too easily tempted. Her homemade bread is to die for--light and sweet loaves that come to loved ones covered in pretty dish towels.

She wraps presents beautifully. Her Christmas package is the biggest treat, since there are always linen snowflake doilies as package decorations, lovely fabric ribbons and rick rack with tree ornaments tied into the curled trims.

Her favorite color is green. When I was little, I told my mom we should start collecting something green for Aunt Laurie, and Mom asked what I thought we should collect for her. All I could think of that was green was frogs--poor Aunt Laurie!--so ever since, it has frogs and frog-related things for her. When her times are hard, I am sure to mention that "It's not easy being green," and "Have I toad you lately that I love you?" candy boxes have been known to appear in her mailbox on Valentine's Day.

She is the only person in my family who calls me "Valerie" instead of "Val."

She lives in a gorgeous old white farmhouse with her husband of 42 years and one of my cousins, she loves to garden, she gets a kick out of gnomes, and Lily of the Valley is her favorite flower.

The first gift I remember ever receiving from her was a lavender unicorn-covered diary I got for Christmas in the third grade. I still have it. For my birthday last May, she took me and my mom out for breakfast and presented me with a Rose afterward. While I was home in July, she threw me a mini bridal shower in the dining room with my mom and cousins present.

Aunt Laurie hates to be called "cute," always envisioning herself more like a sexy Ann-Margret, of whom she used to keep scrapbooks. (Aunt Laurie was thrilled when I performed in my high school's production of Bye Bye Birdie, and she and Mom reminisced all that spring about the songs and movies from their own high school years.) Aunt Laurie really is adorable, though, and even now that she is retired and has a granddaughter in high school, she still gets called "Honey" and "Sweetie" and "Sweetheart" by sales clerks and other strangers and has that air about her that makes people want to pinch her cheeks and cuddle her.

She lived across the street from my family for a few years while I was growing up, and I remember one Christmas, my mom, my cousins, and I were sitting in her living room while my mom read some silly magazine personality quiz to Aunt Laurie. "You want to go Christmas caroling with the neighbors," my mom read aloud, "but you know your singing voice isn't the greatest. Do you A.) go anyway or B.) stay home?" "Well, shoot, I'd go!" my aunt cried out in a surprisingly indignant tone, shocking my mom and making us all laugh at her unexpected response. "What do I care what they think? They don't have to like it!" It is probably twenty-five years since that conversation and I still can't hear mention of Christmas caroling without remembering Aunt Laurie's uncharacteristic outburst (and her younger sister's surprise at her boldness) and smiling.

When I was twenty years old, I mentioned during one visit that I had a small success to report. I had finally stopped biting my nails, was all, but before I could go on to explain that, Aunt Laurie quietly said, "Ah! That's good, Valerie. Small successes are good." :) She was proud of me for losing a lot of weight a few years ago but was happier to hear that I was happy and loving my life again after a number of years of not loving it very much at all. "Oh, Valerie, that's WONDERFUL!" I can hear her exclaim at every mention of something that I'm excited about.

Neither she nor I can easily stop laughing once we get started, and Aunt Laurie starts slapping her knee when she really gets going, which makes everything even funnier. In 2003, the subject of hair dyes came up while she, Mom, and I were hanging out looking at magazines over tea and coffee, and I mentioned that when Marilyn Monroe had been asked if she minded that people thought she was dumb because she was blonde, she had responded, "No, because I know I'm not dumb. I also know I'm not really blonde." Aunt Laurie loved that, being a brunette-turned-blonde herself, and laughed and laughed.

She adored her grandparents, has been with my uncle since high school, and is best friends with my mom, who rightfully calls her "Lovey."
 
Although there are phone calls and visits, as well, it is the letters that have kept us close over the years, each parcel of news and magazine clippings and recipes and dreams and quotes and fall leaves and frog stickers tying our ties a little tighter. My pen pal since childhood, Aunt Laurie can always be counted on to stay in touch, and that is no small thing to say about someone. Her jack-o-lantern-covered Halloween mail is smiling at me from a bookshelf this morning, and this year's November mail will soon be winging its way across the state to her, Kermit the Frog Macy's Thanksgiving Day Day Parade float pictures gracing the envelope. :)

Over Homemade Bread and Jelly

At my grandfather's viewing in April of 2001, one of his friends, a garrulous man named Sam I remember as a more self-assured and quicker-to-laugh Jackie Gleason, sat down with me and one of my cousins, the two of us Papa's only granddaughters out of seven grandchildren, and talked about how he had admired our grandfather. Our own generation would have to do a hell of a lot of work to become the kind of people our grandparents were, Sam told us. Papa and those of his generation seemed quite special and just good and strong in some way that later generations did not. The only other thing I specifically remember Papa's friend telling us was how rare and wonderful it was to know someone who, when you unexpectedly stopped by for a quick visit, would welcome you into his home and say, well, first, Papa's usual "Take your hat off and stay awhile," and then, "Here, pull up a chair. Mum just made some of her bread and we still have jelly from this past summer" and how good it was just to sit with Papa in the kitchen and talk over fresh homemade bread and homemade jelly. Sure, some people offer coffee or cake for a guest, Sam went on, but to be able to visit over bread and jelly! That our grandfather had no pretenses about such things and understood how good it was just to catch up with a friend over homemade bread and homemade jelly...! Sam wanted us to understand this. He went on and on about it. It was such a simple thing, he told us, but that was one of the things he would miss the most now that our grandfather had died, and there just weren't people out there like our grandfather anymore.

In one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, she mentions that her future husband, Almanzo, once asked her, "What kind of man do you think I am?" and Laura admits that she'd never given it any thought. But it is something I've given a lot of thought, and I remember deciding--no, not deciding, just knowing--that day at the funeral home that I would never marry anyone who didn't understand about the bread and jelly.