Grandma's Gifts

Grandma’s Gift

Love is a language which the blind can see

and the deaf can hear.

-Donald Wildman

She made it look so easy. Living. Loving. Day to day, week to week, year by year. I wish I could ask her how she did it.

She laughed easily and was relaxed about life. She could window-shop all day and buy nothing. She often sat in the car, knitting for more than an hour, while she waited for me to be dismissed from school. She was short and fat and wrestled constantly with wisps of greying hair that often escaped her tight bun. Her feet were short and bent into shoes that looked as if they caused rather than accommodated her bunions. Every single day of her life she wore a girdle, pantyhose, and a dress.

She lived what appeared to be an unextraordinary life, but to me she was an extraordinary woman. It wasn’t her Phi Beta Kappa honors from Radcliffe. It wasn’t that she volunteered to read and knit for the blind and homeless well into her eighties. It wasn’t her paying $5.00 of her own wages in 1918 toward the United War Campaign Fund and being named a Victory Girl. It was her ability to make peace - to find peace, really - wherever she was.

She played bridge with “the girls” once a week. She cooked and cleaned, and loved her husband in an easy matter-of-fact way every day. While he prayed each morning, she cleaned the kitchen, made the bed, and checked in with her friends. Her home was comfortably kept although she rarely did more than run an old vacuum around.

When it was a day for him to go to Temple, she would drive him and wait outside. I was five and I would go along because I knew we would walk and talk, or I could color in my book and sing to her while we sat in the car or in the park, and she knit. Other times we would go “downtown” and have a “little something” at the counter in the five-and-ten, or an ice cream at Bailey’s. If I hadn’t been there, she would have knit or worked the daily crossword, but because I was there, we shared a special love.

I know she was once a daughter, a sister, a school teacher, and later a wife and a mother, but I knew her simply: as a grandmother who always loved me.