I'm eight years of freckled skin and tangled hair twisted into pigtails with rubber bands and I sit on the concrete steps off my grandmother's porch, counting the black and white hexagon squares to the sidewalk. It's Christmastime, and my daddy's brother (the preacher) and my aunt his sister (the one who wears fine clothes and lives in the big brick house with shiny hardwood floors and a maid) and most of my cousins all live right near, but they don't come to grandmother's house when we do. And I never know why.
I love my grandmother's little house with the heater grates on the floor that burn my bare feet, and the black and white tiles in the bathroom, and the Queen Anne table with the white crimped-edge candy dishes and glossy cowrie shells I hold tight to my ear to listen to the waves.
I'm not allowed past her bedroom door, so I peek past the glass doorknob to the sun room I never enter, and the Singer sewing machine, and the stacks of brocade and silk and linen and wool, and the fine clothing with straight pinned hems hanging from closet doors. For more years than I know, my grandmother's a seamstress for those with elegant tastes; and her dresses and the oriental rug under the dining room table where I never eat are always strung with bits of colored thread.
When I'm sixteen or seventeen, I dream of a prom dress with a bodice covered in lace and the softest yellow tulle draping my feet; and somehow grandmother knows it and she sends me the dress in a package wrapped in brown paper; and though I don't know it for sure because she never says so, I tell my friends how much my grandmother loves me to make me such a beautiful dress.
I ride the train to grandmothers house all by myself once or twice before I'm nineteen and on my own and in nursing school, and grandmother - with her quiet nature and tight blue curls - lets me live in the bedroom between hers and the tiny room by the front porch while I'm in college in the city where she lives. Sometimes we meet in the kitchen over buttered brown bread toast and at the end of the day when we brush our teeth before bed. When I have mono, she washes the breakfast dishes in bleach as I walk out the door for class, and I'm in nursing school so I understand why, but I always wonder if she thought I was dirty.
When my nephew is born, my grandmother and I sit together on her green upholstered couch and she shows me how to crochet scalloped pastel strings onto the edges of flannel for the baby. It's the only thing she ever taught me, and I wish I could remember how to do that today.
I'm just past thirty and only see grandmother once in her assisted-living room; and for the first time touch her sewing machine and her cherry four-posted bed that nearly fills the small room darkened by heavy curtains that drape the floor.
At her funeral a few weeks later, I tuck a poem into the corner of the casket of the only grandparent I knew. She never knows my children, but then I'm not sure she ever really knew me.
It's a fearful and wonderful thing to read about Timothy's grandmother and the privilege and responsibility I have been given to be a "mimi" like his, and to rest in the grace that will fill the gaps between who I am and who I want to be.
I will utter dark sayings from of old,
things that we have heard and known,
that our fathers have told us.
We will not hide them from their children,
but tell to the coming generation
the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might,
and the wonders that he has done.
He established a testimony in Jacob
and appointed a law in Israel,
which he commanded our fathers
to teach to their children,
that the next generation might know them,
the children yet unborn,
and arise and tell them to their children,
so that they should set their hope in God
and not forget the works of God,
but keep his commandments;
~ Psalm 78:2-7 ESV
{A summer morning creekside and around the pond on Pollywog Creek}
