Wanda

My Grandma had her jeans dry-cleaned and then ironed them before she wore them.  She had a coke (in a glass exactly like this one) and toast made in a toaster oven for breakfast each morning.  You know the type where the little metal tray slides out and you put the toast on the tray?  It makes it perfectly golden brown along the edges. (I can taste it right now.  It’s not like normal toast because you butter it before it goes in.) 

She walked each morning and took a nap in the afternoon and always had mother of pearl beige nail polish on.  She played cards her entire life, got her hair done each week and never said an unkind word about anyone.  She paid me five dollars to polish her silver that didn’t need polishing and wore White Shoulders perfume and looked stunning in a denim skirt and red espadrille wedges.  She washed her face with dove soap and to this day, the smell of it will bring instant tears to my mother’s eyes.  

She was in love with my Grandpa and was spoiled by him every day in the most loving way.  She didn’t like to fish or hunt but she went fishing and hunting. She loved to watch The Lawrence Welk Show and read more books than anyone I know.  She knew the words to every song and would hum while she filed her nails.  She had this little skip or spring to her step if you complimented her and she’d cut her eyes at you for saying such sweet things about her.  She held my oldest in her arms only a few weeks before she passed away.  He was only weeks old. 

In the last years of her life, she suffered a stroke and began to write names or thoughts that came to her, perhaps to spark her memory, on the back of little yellow legal pads.  I have one that I keep on the shelf in my office.  It’s just a little reminder of her that I like to see when I’m in there.  It brings back all those memories for me; her waving at us from the kitchen window as we drove by, the cases of cokes she had stacked in the pantry, the pile of blue rubber bands from the morning newspaper she kept in the kitchen drawer.  It’s amazing what memories come flooding in as I see the notebook sitting on my shelf.  

I was thinking of her today as I made my toast and wished I had a case of coke sitting in the pantry to go with it. Wishing she could see my boys today.