Last week my grandma passed away. Over the weekend, we had a private graveside service in her honor. She was my last grandparent.
I’m not sad. She’s been waiting for this for a long time. I’ll miss her, of course, but she had Alzheimer’s, so she’s already been gone - in that tragic way that diseases of the mind steal a person away - for many years. I’m grateful that she has been released and reunited with my grandpa.
I was my grandma’s first granddaughter. For a while, it was just a bunch of boys and me. My cousin, Jess, and I were born in the same day - New Year’s Day 1984. I was late, he was early. We were also blessed and baptized on the same days.
My line was the only one with four generations of women from the family living at the same time: my grandma, my mom, me, and my daughters.
Four generations when I only had Daisy
My grandma’s house was a historical gem. As a child, it was just “Grandma’s house,” but as I got older, I started realizing that my grandma’s house was really unique (check out my grandma’s house in this post).
There are some distinct things I’ll always remember about my grandmas’s house. There was a hook in a door frame to hang a swing from. There was a tiny table for children under the bar. There was a toy drawer in the kitchen, a small rocking chair in the living room that played music as you rocked in it, a grandfather clock that chimed every quarter hour, and a basket of hotel toiletries on the draining board (my grandparents traveled a lot for my grandpa’s career, so my grandma was always bringing home hotel toiletries and conference swag to hand out to us like party favors) (also, “the draining board” is what my grandma called a particular counter in her kitchen. No one really knows where “draining board” came from). The house had a laundry chute accessible from a drawer in my grandma’s bedroom. In the basement there was a phone booth, a satellite chair, and a copy machine. A copy machine! (Just one more thing I didn’t know was unusual about my grandma’s house until I got older).
My grandma’s house was a sanctuary for me as a child. It was a place where I always felt safe and happy… unless I was going to the bathroom. I hated going to the bathroom at my grandma’s house. The main bathroom had two doors, and neither of them locked. I was constantly walked in on, so I would go to great lengths to not have to pee at her house. There was also a toilet in the laundry room in the basement, but again, two entrances and no locks. The uppermost level of the house had a bathroom that I would always sneak and use until one day my grandma found me walking down the stairs and said, “I hope you didn’t use the toilet up there. It’s been having problems.” I don’t think that bathroom ever worked again.
For many of my growing years, my grandpa was the stake Patriarch (I wrote a post about that here). My grandma was in charge of typing up the transcripts of the blessings my grandpa gave. I used to go to her house to play the piano while she would type blessings in my grandpa’s office. The clickety clack of the typewriter while my grandpa’s voice played on the tape recorder was a huge part of the soundtrack of my childhood.
My grandma loved to feed people. Whenever I went to her house, I would sit on a bar stool at the counter and watch TV (there was always a swiveling TV on the bar that could turn toward the cooking area or the dining area), and my grandma would serve up all sorts of snacks. Some of the food you could always find at my grandma’s house were Boston baked beans, canned peaches (my grandpa loved canned peaches, so there were always some in the fridge), popsicles, ice cream, chocolate crinkle cookies, Lay’s potato chips with ranch dip, dill pickles (another favorite of my grandpa’s), Banquet chicken pot pies, and soda pop. My grandma always had a dresser full of soda pop in the “back bedroom.” There were cold sodas in the fridge, but she’d always keep half-drank cans in the refrigerator door and would make us drink those before we could open a new one. I would always try to sneak a fresh one instead of drinking a flat, five-day-old leftover can from one of my cousins. Some of her signature dishes for family parties were meatballs, baked beans, sloppy joes, finger jello, and crescent rolls. Whenever we refused to try a food, Grandma would say, “If it kills you, you’ll never have to eat it again!”
My grandma was an avid knitter of two particular items: slippers and dishcloths. She would always have us trace our feet on a piece of paper so she could make us slippers. She would make dishcloths to hand out for every holiday - usually in corresponding holiday colors. She always had a stash of dishcloths and slippers stowed away. She taught me how to knit the dishcloths (though I don’t remember, I’d have to relearn a few things like casting on and casting off), and she explained to me that the reason her dishcloths were so good was because she had a “tight knit.”
My grandma’s kitchen was the center of her home. We never knocked when we went over - we just barged through the kitchen door. Most of the time, that’s where Grandma would be - washing dishes, talking on the phone, or sitting at the table watching people walk down the street.
There was always a stack of my grandparents’ most recently developed photos sitting on the end of the counter in the kitchen, and I always loved looking through them. There were also always obituaries hanging on my grandma’s fridge, so I routinely checked to see if there were any new ones every time I went over.
My grandma took care of a lot of pets. She always had at least one cat and a dog around. Others included a chinchilla named Chick, a parakeet named Charlotte, and a chicken with a broken beak named Lucy. Lucy was actually my uncle Tim’s (who lived next door), but Grandma babied Lucy, so Lucy would make her way over to Grandma’s house for treats every day.
My grandma always called me Matilda. I have no idea why.
She walked a lot and had a standing walking date with her friend, a man named Deel, at the church across the street where they would do laps around the parking lot. When I would walk to school in the mornings, I would always see my grandma and Deel. She and Deel both loved to grow flowers and would often talk about gardening. When Scotty and I first bought our house, my grandma and Deel came over to plant some flowers for me… which I then killed (I always thought my grandma’s friendship with Deel was kind of weird).
Grandma was always convinced that babies had red hair. You could pretty much guarantee that any time she saw a baby for the first time, she would comment, “Well, he’s got a little bit of red in his hair, doesn’t he?” You couldn’t argue with her on this. She would just end up parading the baby around in all the different lighting trying to show you the red hair.
My grandma’s calendar was an iconic feature in her life. Every year the McDougal funeral home sent out a free calendar in the mail, and that was always the calendar my grandma would use. On birthdays, she wrote the person’s name with their age circled next to it. She also did the same for various other things. If you wanted to know how old her TV was, you could find it in the calendar. How long had great-grandpa been dead? Calendar. How long had she had Puglsey the cat? Calendar. My grandma was so loyal to her McDougal calendar that it’s only fitting that McDougal did her services.
With the loss of my grandma, I’ve been combing through my memories of her, especially from my childhood. Oh, how I loved my grandma! Her house was truly the best place on earth to me. I’m full of gratitude for her life and the person she was.
