Day 23: I’m thankful today for memories. {and new tableware}
Memories are a powerful thing. The older I get the more I realize how where I’m from defines my identity today. The older I get the more the interest in my family, specifically my grandparents, increases. I want to really know them. I want to understand them. I want to learn from them. I want to know how I’m like them.
My mom returned 12 hours back from Texas with her Forrester packed to the brim with memories sorted out painfully by my Aunt who is there for it all. She’s strong. I thought of them in their parents giant house with it’s light walls and floor but empty of life. After another serious sickness, another bad fall, they relented, fists clenched and chins still high and resigned themselves to assisted living.
The process of dying is a struggle, a lengthy one. A painful one.
I can’t even imagine this. I feel conversely so old and so young.
I remember my Grandparents in their prime. On a remote ranch in the middle of the hill country. In a mansion with marble floors and a more diverse wildlife on their shelves walls than most zoos. My memories are of my Granny in her kitchen, making the best tasting things in the world. She spoiled us when we came. I sat at the bar and watched her do miracles in soup with only a ham bone. She was amazing. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, with the class of a high society lady but one who could skin and gut a deer with better precision than a butcher. She had a garden that I had no appreciation for at the time.
That is my Granny.
She’s in the middle- with the black short-sleeved blouse on. You know the most beautiful one in the group. She was the president of this high school club.
**********
I muse, unpacking my box. Unwrapping a bowl. About to get to the plates. I couldn’t think of anything meaningful that I wanted from her house. So I said I wanted my Grandmothers tableware because Ben and I have been married long enough that our things are broken and chipped by life and our boys. Tableware was practical. It just makes sense.
I reached, socked footed tiptoes, to my cabinets, reorganizing.
it hits me.
The last meal I had on that bowl was from this spring. Before they moved. Before they admitted they needed help. That was the time I realized something was wrong. She asked me the same thing 4 times in a row. I smiled, with tears prickling, and said the same thing again and again. She had insisted on making a fancy meal. We said no, don’t worry about it! But she had a clipping from a magazine and wanted to make a fancy soup, like she knew I loved.
It was a simple, perfect soup. Recipe to be ready in 30-45 minutes.
It took over 3 hours.
We sat, later into the night, sipping on the soup in these bowls. Smiling.
I fall apart.
They had hung on for that visit. You know?
I fall apart.
and then continue to stack her bowls in my cabinet.
