Grandmother Grace

“If she heard you call her 'grandma' she would probably burst into tears,” my mom says matter-of-factly. “You know that right?”

The two of us are running errands in my hometown and my mom replies as so after I question the well-being of her mother. After my granddad Bill suffered a severe heart-attack a few weeks before, my grandmother, who usually possesses the composure of Cinderella’s fairy god-mother, has been troublingly frantic. With her desperate midnight calls, sobs pouring into the receiver, I cannot help but think of all the things that make my grandmother so special to me, so magical.

My grandmother—never grandma--Grace is, without question, the oddest yet most loving person I have ever come into contact with. My earliest remembrance of her involves the elaborate tales she would tell my sisters and I about the boyish mouse Herkimer who lived under her staircase. Whenever a glass of milk was spilled at the dinner table or one of her ornate, glass birds would turn up with a broken wing—she would wipe away our tears and simply explain that perhaps Herkimer was thirsty or that Herkimer must have been playing ball in the house with his brothers and sisters. My aunt Nancy, the third of my grandparents’ four daughters, has been taking care of her parents for the last few weeks through my grandfather’s recovery. The day before I left home, my mother and I exploded into laugher as my aunt relayed to us that when she confronted my grandmother Grace about some cheese that had been left out over-night, my grandmother burst into tears, saying she had left it out for Herkimer’s son, Cheddar.

Other than her fantastical tales of Herkimer the mouse, I admire my grandmother Grace's overwhelming sense of appreciation for the seemingly insignificant aspects of life. Just the tone of her “Heellooo?!” each time we step inside the same four walls my mom grew up in excites within me such a sense of belonging. She always flies into our arms, adoring our faces with modest-pink-lipstick kisses, exclaiming “How WONDERFUL” it is that we have arrived in her home.

A beige-colored sheet of construction paper on which my sister and I created wax art when we were six and eight still adorns her wall of pride-- newspaper clippings and crayon scribbled papers surrounding her vanity mirror. She once told me how much she admired my “beautiful cursive handwriting” and sure enough, the next time I passed her vanity, she had cut out my signature from the bottom of a letter I had written her and had taped it to her wall.

Even as a child, I remember watching her regard the simplest moments of her life with absolute delight and a constantly thankful spirit. Every gift she received, every compliment, was so extraordinary, so wonderful. Throughout my childhood, I witnessed her unending forgiveness and her insistence to “Never let the sun go down on your anger,” her stead-fast faith in God, always pouring over us with prayers and bible verses and the unwavering love she had for us, just in the way her eyes sparkled as we fell into her arms.

---