Grandma Candy

I'm having a hard time with my grandma right now, my grandma who is my mom's mom. Instead of dragging out the details of her crazy relationship with my mom and how protective I feel of my mom because of it, I need to recall that we've had brighter times and that our relationships are broader than our current situation. I need to concentrate on what I've loved about my grandma in my nearly 4 decades of knowing her. I need to call up what I miss about her, because we are very disconnected right now. I need to remember the qualities I've cherished about her so I can look back and draw on this warmth and love in the challenging weeks to come.

Here are some of my best memories of my grandma:

Grandma loved me when I was a baby. I was her first grandchild, and she took care of me while my mom worked days at the county hospital. There are pictures of her holding me during my first year, and you can see that she is smitten. When I was an older child I always felt like I was special to her, maybe even her favorite. I'm sure this was because of our time together when I was just an infant.

When we were small, my brother and I loved going to grandma Canny's house. Sometimes we called her "grandma Candy". Any kid who visited her was invited to dive into the bowls of sweets she had placed around her home. She was round and quiet, slow-moving and soft. Her eyes were the color of dark chocolate, and they sparkled with light when she laughed. Not a lot of people got to see her laugh, but we did.

Grandma wore a flowery apron when she cooked pork chops or cleaned house or did the washing. She used an old washing machine that had a wringer attached, and she showed us how to put the clothes through without getting our fingers caught. Doing wash with her was fun and exciting, and on summer Mondays we got to help hang the laundry out in the sunshine.

Grandma's backyard was an amazing place. It had the brightest sun and the most colorful flowers and the messiest mudpies we'd ever seen. It was never lonely in her yard because she was always with us, planting or weeding or swaying on the pink porch swing. She let us pick her flowers and pull up her big leafed plants to pretend they were umbrellas.

Once we found a nest in her yard, and inside it was a baby bird. It had fallen out of a tree, and its mama was nowhere to be found. Grandma let us take the nest up to the back porch, and showed us how to feed the bird sugar water with an eye dropper. She kept vigil with us over the fledgling until an evening shower drove us inside. She comforted us when we found the baby in its water-filled nest the next morning.

My grandma had a wild imagination that she shared with few people. Outside of my brother and I, I don't know how many got to experience it. She told stories about cities under the sea and creatures from other galaxies. She spun ghost stories that made our hair stand on end. It was especially fun to hear these tales while we sat on the back porch with her and our grandpa, looking up at the stars. We spent many hours at this, every night during our summer visits.

The best part about being at my grandma's house was how time stood still as soon as we walked through the door. There was nothing to rush for, nothing to hurry about, just a cocoon of space and time for playing and laughing and feeling loved in.
And in this cocoon was grandma, who was present and accounted for in a way that no other adult was. She spent hours at the kitchen table playing bingo or poring over old family photos and telling us stories about life before we were born. I know now that when I am doing my best parenting and being most present with children, it is because of these times spent basking in the love of my grandma Canny.