A Visit From Grandma

I'm feeling pretty good today, btw, and thanks to those who commented yesterday. I mean, I could still use a vacation at the Mayo Clinic, but that's pretty much every day. I had a wonderful therapeutic mini-massage this morning, and the basement sink is clogged, but generally okay.

On the way home from the massage, I had a little visit with my Grandma Ida. Okay, let's say I enjoyed a little fantasy visit from Grandma. Because a real one would be scary, since she'd be about 117 years old and a zombie and all that. But the fantasy visit went like this:

The doorbell rings and I answer, and Grandma Ida is standing on my front porch. She looks pretty much like this:



except not fancy. (This was their 50th anniversary photo.) Grandma Ida was basically good peasant stock, never wore make-up that I can remember, styled her hair with a man's pocket comb. She was very pretty, as I have mentioned, but generally wore simple dresses with sturdy shoes. Which is how she would be dressed on my front porch. She would also be carrying a black purse draped over her arm -- the kind that snaps closed with a clasp at the top -- and would be carrying two shopping bags, one in each hand.

"Grandma!" hug hug hug "Come in! Let me show you my house!" She puts down her shopping bags in the living room, but holds onto her purse as I show her around. She is nodding and smiling. My house is small, which suits her fine. All she ever wanted was to live in a nice small house.

(Come to think of it, Grandma liked small things, as I do. I think she was so used to moving from one place to another at the drop of a hat that it made more sense to her to have small things. Why have an 8 x 10 of your grandchildren when a 5 x 7 will do? Who needs a hairbrush when you can have a pocket comb?)

We sit at my kitchen table and have some tea. She has hers in a tall glass, with the sugar in cubes and a lot of milk. (Skim milk? Never heard of it.) She does dissolve the sugar in the tea, though; she doesn't hold the cube between her teeth and drink the tea through it, although it wasn't uncommon among her generation. She'll have a nice little piece cake with it, too. When we're done, she'll take the dishes to the sink and wash them, despite my protest of "Grandma, I'll wash the dishes!" And then she looks at the sink. She leans down, opens the cabinet door underneath and peers in at my cleaning supplies and says "Where is the Ajax?" (I wish I could convey her inflection to you.) Hmm.

Next thing I know, Grandma is scrubbing my sink and countertop, and then my stove, inside and out, and then the refrigerator. And then she says "Is there a pail someplace, maybe, and a brush?"

Ahhh. She'll tell me to do the laundry, maybe, or vacuum, while she scrubs the kitchen and bathroom floors on her hands and knees, because how else would you clean a floor? I don't think she dusts or sweeps, her thing is to have her hands in soapy water and scrub. And when she's done ...

She folds the laundry out of the dryer. No one folds laundry like Grandma. She uses her water-worn hands to fold, and smooth out every crease. When she's done, your underwear and socks look like they've been ironed.

She'll stay for dinner, but I put my foot down when she wants to help cook because you never really wanted to eat her cooking. (Although I alone loved her lamb stew.) She'll do the dishes when we're finished eating, and dry them, and put everything away where she thinks it should go so that I'll be calling her for the next three weeks every day to ask where missing stuff is.

She'll smile and thank me for letting her do all that scrubbing today -- and she'll mean it -- and then she'll loop her purse over her arm and pick up her shopping bags -- I have no idea what was ever in the shopping bags that she needed to carry around with her -- and kiss me goodbye at the door and walk down to the corner to wait for the bus. I'll watch from my front porch until I see that she's gotten on.

*sigh* Where's a holodeck when you really need one?




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