I really didn’t know my paternal grandmother. She moved away before I was seven years old and I only saw her once after that. Even when she lived two blocks away I seldom saw her, and only ate dinner at her house twice that I remember, once by myself.
Yet I think I am more like her than anyone else I know in our family. I remember the beautiful handmade dolls she made for each of us. Intricately detailed clown dolls for my brothers and a Chinese doll for me, complete with black silk embroidered clothes. The story is that when my parents went up to the family vacation house one year there was a closet full of matching dresses waiting for my sister and I. Each one carefully embroidered and smocked.
I discovered that she took my father and his sister to museums and places like Turkey Run, Indiana to explore and hike, all things I did with my children, but that my mother did not do with us. I’ve also heard that this grandmother loved to play Bridge and read. I remember some of the books she sent me, Puss In Boots and Paddle To The Sea, both before I was five. In those rare times we were together she told me about the Anasazi and the Hopi and I’m pretty sure that sparked my interest in the history and folklore of both.
As I look back on my life I realize this woman had an incredible influence on my life for no more than I was allowed to be with her, but that a lot of our similarities must be genetic.
Like her I love to create things and read and explore. Like her I wandered off across the country after a long marriage and divorce. But I think I have found a peacefulness and satisfaction in my life at the end that she never found.
I wonder what it would have been like to spend more time with this person who seems to have had more in common with me than any other woman I’ve ever known, but perhaps we spent just the right amount of time together; just enough for her to light the fires that lay latent in me and not enough for me to become her shadow.
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