If you’re curious as to how this situation worked itself out, well, I don’t know if I did the right thing, but I didn’t take it down. He and I met several more times under the hat rack to chat about it—like where the eyeballs were and what happened to all its teeth, and is that why his mom puts sunscreen all over him when he goes to the beach— so he won’t get bleached and his skin dry up and fall off?
But the only thing I convinced Bennett of in all my explanations was this: his grandmother is slightly crazy.
Ina Hughs
Gran
A grandmother is a babysitter who watches the kids instead of the television.
Author Unknown
When I was a young mother my grandmother, who was lonely after my grandfather’s death, visited me every month for a few days. We’d cook together and talk, and she’d always babysit, so I could have time to myself.
By the time she was ninety-five, practically deaf and very frail, I was working part-time, and two of my three children were in school. Gran would come to our home on days when I wasn’t working. Once when she was visiting, my older children were in school, my eighteen-month-old was sleeping, and Gran and I were having coffee. I always felt protected and relaxed when we were together. Then I got a telephone call that there was a crisis in my office— would I please come in for an hour or two. Gran assured me that she and Jeff, the eighteen-month-old, would be fine, and I left.
As I drove to work, I panicked. I’d left my deaf, elderly grandmother with an eighteen-month-old she was not strong enough to pick up and could not hear if he cried. But Gran inspired so much confidence that I felt it would be all right. And perhaps, if I was lucky, my son would sleep the whole time I was gone.
I returned two hours later and heard happy sounds coming from Jeff’s room. He’d awakened, she’d dragged a chair next to his crib, and she was reading him a story. He sat there, enchanted by her voice, unperturbed by the bars of the crib that separated them. And our German shepherd lay at her feet, also completely content.
The drama of that day did affect Gran, who later admitted that communicating with an eighteen-month-old presented some problems. Unlike adults, if he’d needed something and wanted her to know about it, of course he couldn’t write it down. The next week she enrolled in a lip-reading course at a local college. The teacher was a young intern, and Gran was her only student. After the first session, the teacher made the trip to Gran’s apartment each week, so Gran wouldn’t have to travel to the college, changing buses twice. By the end of the semester, Gran’s ability to lip-read had greatly improved, and she felt infinitely more comfortable with Jeff and with the rest of the world.
Gran continued to communicate with Jeff in this way until she died, a few days before her hundredth birthday— leaving an unbearable void in my life.
Mary Ann Horenstein
Little Bits of Letting Go
I sit at the picnic table on an early morning visit to my grandma’s farm. From here I can see most of her twenty acres, lowland pasture cut by the muddy waters of the Snohomish River, and the barn, red paint long since faded into rough wood siding. The wind rushes up from the river and sends me deep into the wool lining of my coat. It carries on its swirling back the sounds saved up from all the years: laughter of children running through the corn and Grandma’s chuckle as she accepts another fistful of field flowers. Her presence echoes across this land—but Grandma isn’t here. The heart of this farm is now in a “home” in town.
It has been four years since Grandma’s stroke, four years of visits to the home and quiet conversations while Oprah keeps the others company. The sudden grasp of illness, added to long years working her farm has used up Grandma’s legs. In the afternoon I find her in bed, propped up with pillows to keep the weight off her bottom. The cushion of her wheelchair aggravates a sore that won’t heal. She pulls her sweater around her shoulders and assures me, “I’m doing fine. Just have to lie down awhile.” I wipe a tear and make a comment about a darned summer cold.
Grandma’s family settled here more than eighty years ago. They made their first home on Mill Street, across the railroad tracks from a German family with two daughters about the same age as Grandma and her sister Margit. Gram tells me about Norma and Alice. “They were the first friends we met. We walked right past their house on our way to school.” Now Norma and Alice reside in the corner room, down the hall, two more old women confined to chairs with wide spoke wheels.
I imagine them climbing School House Hill together. Grandma in a plaid dropped-waist dress, black socks stretched to the hem, her thick, dark hair pulled back with a wide cloth bow. “One, two, buckle my shoe . . .” skipping songs in mixed notes fill the air as the girls swing their book straps.
Grandma sips her tea and talks about Grandpa. “We found a justice of the peace in Montesano, and that’s where we got married. We lived at Copalis by the ocean.”
I’ve got a postcard that Gram sent home to her folks. Old growth evergreens tower in the background. Two dogs are pictured by the new road to Pacific Beach; Grandpa was on the construction crew.
She looks at the collage of family pictures arranged on the nightstand. “He had a cold, so he told me to sleep upstairs.” There is loneliness in Grandma’s voice. “I should have stayed with him. That’s when he died.” Thirty-five years disappear in a sigh.
Grandma was a gardener. Rows of sweet corn and snap beans were harvested and preserved in clear Ball jars. Her peonies, like fancy ladies in ruffled bonnets, danced beneath the lilac hedge. In October, Grandma’s homemade ladder leaned into the apple trees that lined her driveway.
Peonies brighten the walk to my back door. Gram gave me a start one spring for my new home. “Plant them where they can stay, they don’t like to be transplanted.” Her back was straight as she dug around the tender shoots.
Grandma smoothes the satin edge of her blanket. “When I get home, you and your daughter will have to come, and we’ll sew a quilt. We can clear the dining-room table and spread out the layers. We’ll pin it with those nice, big safety pins you brought me.”
“I bought those at Sprouse.” Small talk seems to help my cold symptoms.
I hold my grandma’s warm hand, tracing the wrinkles that testify to her long life. I want to gather her up, go back to the farm, pick apples, pin quilts. But the yards of oxygen hose and the emergency call button around her neck ground me in reality. Gram is safe and comfortable. She squeezes my hand and smiles. My eyes are dry now. I know my tears are just little bits of letting go, as frame by frame, I recount our good times. My heart is full. I wear my grandma’s love like a golden locket, and I am rich. For I have loved her too.
Lynda Van Wyk
Porch-Swing Cocktails
A grandmother is a mother who has a second chance.
Anonymous
This is not one of those “when Grandma was alive she used to . . .” stories you often read. No, my grandmother is alive and well and kicking at eighty-four and so, I guess you could call this one of those “let’s see if my memory is as good as hers” stories:
When I was growing up, my parents went out on Saturday nights and my grandmother babysat for me. For their big night out, Dad always wore a shirt with a very 1960s ruffled collar and puffy sleeves and had neatly trimmed sideburns. Mom dressed in a miniskirt and shiny white go-go boots. It was the only night my parents were free to go out and have some fun for themselves, but I knew I had just as much fun as they did.
My grandmother went all out for my weekly visits. Shortly after Mom and Dad dropped me off, dinner would be served. I loved her carrots. Sliced thick and never mushy, they swam in a sea of butter and melted in my mouth like candy. “Orange wheels,” I called them, which always made her laugh.
Grandma’s other specialty was a steaming platter heaped with succulent chicken and rice. Being a five-year-old boy, I was too young to know that this was the only meal of the week Grandma actually cooked anymore. With her arthritis, it was hard just to open the can
of Campbell’s mushroom soup, which she stirred in the rice to give it that special “oomph.” And skinning and deboning the chicken breasts (they were cheaper that way) was a nearly Herculean effort for the little old lady who spent the rest of the week zapping Lean Cuisine dinners and sipping tea with blueberry muffins for dessert.
Grandma had a special set of dishes she’d purchased, one dish a week, at the local grocery store. They were white and covered with blue windmills and little wooden shoes. Grandma told me that she had bought them just for our special dinners, and that I was the only person she ever used them for. This always made me feel ten feet tall. (It was years later before she finally confessed that the real reason she only used them with me was that she’d skipped a few weeks down at the grocery store, and the set was incomplete.)
Dinner was usually over by the time “The Lawrence Welk Show” came on, and even though it was her favorite show, Grandma said she preferred spending time with her “little man.” So we’d retire to the wooden porch swing.
Grandma’s husband, my grandfather, had died years earlier. The two of them had spent countless hours in this very porch swing, rocking back and forth and admiring the Florida sunset while the neighbor children played, dogs barked and flowers bloomed. Now it was my turn to sit next to Grandma and help her while away her lonely Saturday evenings. It never felt creepy, taking my grandfather’s place in that creaky, old porch swing. To me, it just felt right.
While champagne music bubbled through the screen door from the TV, Grandma and I would sit and swing, swing and sit. Sometimes I’d draw, and she would sew. Other times, we’d just talk about the neighbors or what each of us had done that day. She’d share stories about growing up in the Great Depression until the closing strains of champagne music were corked for yet another week. Then it was time for dessert, which, in the best of all grandmotherly traditions, was something Mom would never give me at home: a bottle of Coca-Cola, the short kind that fit perfectly into a young boy’s hand, and a can of fancy mixed nuts. Grandma showed me how to drop the salty Spanish peanuts inside the bottle and watch the soda foam, then take a sip, chomping the slimy nuts and tasting the salty sweetness of the fizzy soda.
Grandma called this concoction our “porch-swing cocktails,” and not only were they delicious, but they made me feel grown up. Imagine a five-year-old drinking a cocktail!
When the Cokes were gone, we’d chomp on cashews and almonds and listen to dogs bark in the distance. Grandma would light a citronella candle to ward off the mosquitoes, so big and plentiful that she called them “Florida’s State Bird”!
As the night got darker, the tempo of our rocking would gradually slow down, until our feet just dangled in the warm air. We hardly moved at all, simply enjoying the smooth ocean breeze from the beach flowing over us. Living half a block from the Atlantic Ocean, there wasn’t a night of her life that Grandma didn’t enjoy falling asleep to the sound of ocean breakers crashing against the sandy beach. She said she wouldn’t trade that sound for anything in the world. . . .
So you see, this is not a “boy, I miss my grandmother” story. It’s a story about good times past, but still possible today. I think I’ll call Grandma and tell her it’s time for some porch-swing cocktails. And even though I’m old enough now to enjoy an alcoholic drink, I’ll go buy some Cokes and nuts—and get ready for my favorite Saturday-night date.
Rusty Fischer
TIES THAT
BIND
One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.
Chinese Proverb
Another Mother
When my mother, hospitalized for a simple flu, died of a heart attack at sixty-five, I would have given the world to have her survive so I could care for her in my home. But she was suddenly, irreparably, devastatingly gone.
That was twenty years ago. Since then I have heard the many woes and worries of friends with aged parents. I feel some relief that this task will never be mine (as my father has married a much younger woman who will assume this responsibility), and yet I also experience wistfulness, even envy. To have my mother—or an older version of her— back with me for just a day!
So the decision we made that afternoon three weeks ago wasn’t difficult. My husband and I live in Sweden. That afternoon we had stopped by his mother’s fifth-floor apartment in Old Town Stockholm to check on her before enjoying a movie and dinner out. At eighty-eight, she was gradually weakening, and for years has longed to join her husband in death. Her 1600s-era home has no elevator, and the steep, winding flights of stone steps had become Mt. Everest. That day she seemed, as the Swedes say, svagg or very weak. “Come home with us,” I heard myself saying.
And surprisingly, this very independent woman did. While I quickly ransacked drawers for nightgowns and necessities, she went into her husband’s long-empty bedroom and closed the door. Only his large picture propped on the bed knows what she said. Then, clutching a grown grandson’s arm with one arthritic hand and with the other a plastic bag of underwear and medicine bottles, she shuffled slowly down the steps in her slippers and robe.
Life for all of us changed.
We gave her our ground-floor bedroom with its adjacent bath and set up dining-room chairs to lean on for the few steps it would take to reach her walker. Upstairs in the guest room, my husband and I, mature but still enthusiastic newlyweds, shoved two single beds together and reconciled ourselves to a crack that seemed like a chasm. We learned to use the toilet quietly and to brush our teeth in the kitchen sink.
I discovered that once a mother, always a mother— even if one’s “child” is a nearly ninety-year-old mother-in-law. Once on the alert for babies, I’m now attuned to her. I also learned that even my perfect doctor-husband—like the average man—hears nothing in the night.
The days now unfold in slow motion; my self-directed days no longer are. I’m sometimes summoned awake before I’m ready, and just-for-me moments don’t come until my husband arrives home, and I can consciously clock out. Mealtimes are regular and seldom vary: butter-thick bread and tea for breakfast, soured yogurt with lingonberry and a few cereal flakes for lunch, and please, a potato for dinner? And don’t forget the small pitcher of water for the too-warm tea, heating the bowl for the too-cold yogurt, the small white pillow for the chair back, the light blue blanket for her shoulders, the lamb-skin rug wrapped around her feet. Remembering each item before she does becomes a game.
Yet Eivor is easy. Grateful. Sweet.
Often we talk as women over tea. She tells me, “There were supposed to be two more babies, but I had trouble, so I have just the one child.” “Was I a good mother?” she wonders. Look at how your son turned out, I assure her. “And now a professor. His father would be so proud,” she says. “I think I spent too much time cleaning,” she says of what seems to me the Swedish indoor sport. “People are more important,” she adds. I nod, and resolve to sit until she has finished her tea before I pop up to load the dishwasher.
Other days, conversation is scant. I prod her with questions and choices, but her only answer is “I don’t know. I am a wreck. This is so terrible. Why can’t I die? Each night I pray to God I can be gone.”
But when tomorrow comes, she is still here. And I am glad. For Eivor is teaching me much.
For the first time, I know the intimacy of helping to bathe an adult. Standing naked as she lowers herself into the lawn chair I have wrestled into our small shower, she is as unselfconscious as I am slightly embarrassed. I test the temperature of the water before handing her the nozzle. I shampoo her newly permed white hair. As she stands dripping at her walker, I towel her dry then apply gardenia-scented lotion, warming it first between my palms.
How many times have I bathed my babies, my grand-babies? It’s not so different, only one doesn’t grab the rubber duck or camera. And it is every bit as tender. But time has replaced soft, sweet curves and dimples. The hips which conceived and bore and lost babies are wide, the years have lichened her body with the thickened bro
wn spots of old age. No airbrushed, magazine advertisement this, yet there is beauty here. And history: the playing child running free, the young mother cradling the babe who will become the man I love, the passionate wife, the outstanding cook and hostess, the old woman bent over her sick husband.
As a woman well into middle age, I look at my mother-in-law and acknowledge the preview of my own body, should the movie of my life last as long as hers.
I’ve come to enjoy our physical contact as much as she does. Such simple pleasures: the warmth of the blow-dryer on pink scalp, the feel of my fingers in her still-heavy hair. The slipperiness of her perpetually cold hands as I smooth lotion into the gnarled knuckles, willing warmth into them. Her satisfaction at a fresh nightgown and clean robe. Her white head against my chest—suddenly, surprisingly, as precious as the soft downy heads of my babies.
She may not know it, but Eivor bears many gifts. Oh, not her nightly, “Thank you for today, Jann,” nor her instruction on the proper folding of used plastic bags, nor her lesson on the Swedish custom of welcoming spring by wiring colored feathers to birch branches and placing them in water until the “mouse ear” green leaves appear.
No, she’s also teaching me the importance of patience: the grace of eating and drinking and moving more slowly, the importance of expressing gratitude regularly, the delight in a snowy day or the sight of a vase full of tulips close-up or the enjoyment of children at play in a nearby yard.
Eivor is teaching me that my own body—which looks to me so unattractive at nearly fifty-nine—is really quite young and agile in comparison. She’s teaching me that death needn’t be feared if life has been savored. But most of all she’s teaching me that it’s never too late to learn more, to love more.