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Today would be my grandmother’s 87th birthday.  She only made it to 79.  We had my grandfather over for dinner–I’m sure he bought her flowers and put them on her grave marker earlier in the day.  I think of her often.  How she used to call me Bethie.  And her homemade specialties. . . sauce and meatballs and baked macaroni, italian cookies at Christmas, peanut butter bon bons.  I remember how she always used to buy this really thin wheat bread that came in a double wrapped plastic bag.  She would put a slice of american cheese in between and put mayonnaise on both pieces of bread.  I remember Christmas at her house growing up–opening gifts every year on the mantle.  Each grandchild one at a time–it would take us hours.  I remember how her christmas tree always had loads of tinsel.  It was like a Tinsel tree.  I remember one time when we were eating dinner over at her house and I snuck away to look at some books she had on her bookshelf.  I found her Bible and on the front, there was a stick that said “Seven days without Jesus makes one weak”.  I remember how I used to go to the bathroom at her house, and if I was in there for more than thirty seconds, she would come knocking on the door and ask if I was okay and see if I was having a BM.  Literally, she said BM.  Her house always had a distinct smell.  She only wore nightgowns with pockets in them.  Her hair was nearly the same for the entire 23 years that I was alive and knew her.  She spelled my husbands name, Jimmie.  One time, when I was nine, we were checking out at the Convenience store at the entrance to our duplex development.  My grandma promised me that she would stop smoking by my tenth birthday.  She didn’t.  But I still loved her–and prayed all the time that she would stop.  Whenever I was with her, she always had a thing of tic tacs in her purse.  We would drive somewhere, me buckled in the back, and she would always say, “Bethie . . . do you want a tic tac?”.  To which of course, I always said yes.  My grandma loved Precious Moments collectibles and had a full curio cabinet of them.  She loved little dogs.  She liked shopping on the home network channels.  My grandma faced the worst traumatic experience that a mother could ever experience and lost one of her sons when he was only thirty-three years old.  She was never the same–mad at God.  Mad at man.  Mad at the world.  I would be too.  She went back and forth with my grandfather a couple times to Florida–bought houses.  We visited them sometimes–driving 1200 miles with me and my brothers squished in a regular backseat of a car.  No DVD players, iPads, iPods or electronic devices.  Scratch that. . . I think there may have been such a thing as walkmans then.  We played license plates games and slept and I have no idea what else we did.  When we arrived, we would oooh and aaah over my grandma’s orange tree, and their stiff, spiky grass.  We went to a place to see Manatees and pretend mermaids and visited her favorite fruit stand with a happy bloke named Fergie.   Once, my grandparents lived two streets over in a duplex.  I think it was really short-lived, though I don’t recall.  I rode my bike over to their house with my friend after school one day.  She let us put Peeps in the microwave and watch them expand.  I spilled my hot chocolate on the floor.  I remember celebrating my grandparent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary–we had it at a banquet hall.  I was sixteen.  One time, when I was a freshman in high school, my wind ensemble played a concert in Disney World.  My grandparents were living down in Florida at the time, and they drove a couple hours to eat breakfast with me at the hotel and then met us later at Downtown Disney to listen to our concert.  I felt incredibly special.  We were 1200 miles from home, and I had family who loved me enough to come watch our concert.  When James and I got married in 2003, my grandma wasn’t doing so well at that point.  We were married in Rochester, much to my mom’s dislike.  My grandma was nervous about walking down the aisle with my brother as her escort.  She didn’t want to use her walker, so she wasn’t going to walk down the aisle at all.  She did it though–and she did it without her walker.  And just so that they knew exactly where they were going on my wedding day, they did a practice drive to the church the week before–more than two hours of traveling, just so that they had the route down.  My grandma had the worst handwriting ever!  And she always wrote in cursive.  There was a time when we used to write letters back and forth when I was in high school and college.  I still have many of those letters that she wrote back.

She died about a year after I got married.  A little more than seven years have gone by, and I still miss her a lot.  My papa isn’t the same, bless his heart.  But when you lose your life mate, nothing really can ever fill that emptiness.

I know none of my pictures in today’s post have anything to do with the words.  Sometimes that’s just the way it is. . .