Scotty and I no longer have any living grandparents. We were blessed to have most of them in our lives long enough for our kids to meet them, but our last living grandmas passed away a few years ago.
The other night, I had a dream about trying to load my maternal grandma's dishwasher.* It got me thinking about memories of my grandma. I’ve written about her before (here), but I wanted to jot down another series of memories about her.
-My grandma had very little patience for people not trying new foods and would always tell me, “If it kills you, you never have to eat it again.” (I now say that to my kids).
-She had a video rental system. My grandparents had a huge collection of VHS tapes (literally hundreds and hundreds of movies) and a detailed catalogue system. They were all numbered (and stored numerically), and you could look them up on a spreadsheet and borrow them. When you borrowed a tape, you had to write your name on a post it with the number of the video. Then you could retire your post it when you returned your video.
-She was always wiping her floor clean. We always joked about how you could eat off her floor because twenty times a day she would bend down and clean a section of the kitchen floor.
-She loved planting flowers and keeping her flower beds nice. She planted lots of marigolds.
-She knitted two items in mass quantities - slippers and dish cloths. She gave everyone a dish cloth for every holiday and she would trace our feet on paper so she would know how big to make our slippers.
-She loved to cook and bake and had a lot of signature foods: meatballs, rouladen, crinkle cookies, baked beans, taco salad, finger jello, and crescent rolls. She always had Banquet chicken pot pies and Totino’s pizzas in her freezer. Every family party had a relish tray with dill pickles and olives and a bowl of Classic Lay’s with ranch dip.
-She always put towels on the seats of her cars to protect them. We never sat directly on her car seats!
-My grandma traveled a lot with my grandpa for work, and she would always bring back hotel toiletries. She kept them in a basket on her counter and handed them to us like party favors. Every time we left her house, she would make us take something from her stash. We had a family rule that when Grandma offered you something, you took it even if you didn't want it so we could get it out of her house.
-She was an excellent typist. My grandpa was a patriarch in the Church (read more about that here), and it was my grandma’s job to transcribe the blessings he gave. She did this on a typewriter (she started using a computer the last few years of my grandpa's service). I would hang out at her house a lot after school, and she would type blessings while I played the piano. The clickety clack of the typewriter keys was the soundtrack of my grandma's house (that and the chime of the grandfather clock in her living room).** She also did all of the scheduling for blessings and always had post its on the kitchen door frame with the appointments on them. I would always check the appointments for my friends’ names.
-She used the same kind of calendar every year - the free one that came in the mail from the McDougal Funeral Home. She kept track of the anniversaries of everything. If you wanted to know how old her TV was, you could find it on her calendar.
-She spent a lot of time ridding her back porch of box elder bugs. She’d go out there and stomp on them and then sweep them off the porch with her broom. Some people look for dragonflies or butterflies to represent their loved ones. I’m pretty sure my grandma is represented by the box elder bugs.
-She kept a stash of canned soda in a dresser in what was called the "back bedroom." She would let us (the grandkids) have sodas, but she had some weird rules about it. She would let us pour half a can in a cup, and then we would have to put the rest of the can in the fridge. Most of the time, if we wanted a soda, we would have to choose from the selection of half-drank sodas in the fridge that were leftover from other cousins, who knows how long ago. I always hoped for a fresh soda, but she would always make me drink an old, flat one from the fridge. I came up with sneaky ways to get a fresh one when she wasn't looking because I hated drinking those old, flat sodas!
-She was diligent at recycling her soda cans. There was a special spot on the counter where we were supposed to leave our empty soda cans. Then she would crush them by stepping on them and save them up til she had a big bag to recycle.
-She always clipped obituaries and comics from the newspaper and hung them on the fridge. Part of going to Grandma's house always included checking to see if she had any newly dead friends on her fridge.
Read about my grandma’s unique home here.
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*I mentioned this earlier this week - how I have recurring dreams about my grandma's dishwasher. (Weird, right?) I have no explanation or reason for it, but my grandma's dishwasher and kitchen sink are part of my dreams probably at least once a month. I'm not a big believer in dream interpretation, but out of curiosity I did some googling and found that a grandmother's dishwasher can represent nostalgia, a desire to clear away negative emotions, a desire to be nurtured, and preparation for a life change.
**It's strange to me that people were okay living with that kind of noise. Somehow it was pleasing to those older generations to have loud chimes announce each changing hour. Anywhere else, that would drive me nuts, but I was used to it in that house.
