To my knowledge, she has never held a job outside the family farm and doesn’t have any tales of adventure. Her letters, if you can decipher the handwriting, reflect only the chores of the season. In the spring she writes about planting her vegetable garden, in summer she visits the farm and cottage, in the fall she harvests her string beans. Each year she has more string beans than she can use and each winter she busies herself with her friends at the senior center or at the church. Regardless of what year it is, her work is the same and she’s always so busy she never gets everything done.

 

She’s the kind of grandmother who irons the sheets and pillow cases, puts moth balls in the drawers and would never dream of owning a dishwasher. She can sew, knit, embroider and she has probably never watched a soap opera in her life. Nobody can leave her house without a meal or with a hole in their stockings. Grandma knows all the children’s games and all the children’s songs and teaches them to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Sometimes she sings them in Polish, but that’s okay. She’s the kind of Grandma who is every little girl’s best friend and playmate.

 

I remember calling to her from the backyard when I would see her face in the kitchen window over the sink. She would be washing dishes and I’d call out “Grandma, when can you come and play?” I would run down the hill, in the yard, bringing some new discovery into the kitchen. “Grandma! Look at the flowers I picked.” Maybe I’d have a caterpillar the next time. Every new treasure I brought into the house was met with her surprise and delight; she made me feel so very special. 

 

“Oh my!” her voice would greet me with a high pitch shriek. Somehow, she’d shriek and make “oh my” into a fifteen syllable word ending with a giggle. She would greet me excitedly as if each new discovery of mine was hers as well.

 

I saw her a few years ago, having flown up from her home in Wisconsin. She was much shorter than I remembered and she had long given up dyeing her hair black. Since I could remember, she had always taken medication for schizophrenia. Thorzine slowly destroys the nerves in the area of the shoulders and neck. Her head was permanently tilted to one side and her back was stooped. She was so small and frail looking! She looked older than her years. I had forgotten that sometimes she would mutter some unrecognizable phrase under her breath because of the schizophrenia. She looked tired and somewhat depressed. She must have felt eager to get home to her own routine.

 

I was having some difficulty recovering from the shock of seeing how the passage of time had treated her when I was awakened by Amber’s excitement as she entered the room. Amber, my sister’s daughter ran in from the kitchen carrying a ball attached to a string and wooden paddle. She was dressed in a new outfit that only Grandma would buy from some bargain basement – a leftover no one else wanted. Then, Grandma’s eyes lit up and years rolled off her face. “Just a minute,” she said. She smiled shyly, and then she excused herself from our company. She started for the backyard to play with Amber and as they left, I heard what I had long forgotten. Amber said, “look what I can do, Grandma!”

 

 And I heard Grandma respond, “Oh my!”