Over the river and through the woods...

As with Christmas, I'm not dealing very well this week. Holidays, despite the fact that for the latter half of my childhood we lived 1200 miles south of Michigan, still have an undeniable emotional connection to my grandmother. Grandma didn't just observe a holiday, she made it an event. I can still remember waking up in the guest bedroom with the long drapes and glass corner shelf with wee little ceramic figures, staring out the window overlooking "Grandma's towers" (radio array with blinking red lights you could see from almost every window in her house) and being so excited about Easter that my stomach was in knots. It's important to know that aside from receiving a pink plastic bucket filled with green Easter grass and what seemed to be an endless supply of jellybeans and chocolate, I don't remember anything else. The sugar high must have wiped the Easter dress, church and what would have been dinner with the most impressive salad bar I've ever seen outside a restaurant clean from my memory.

I can remember the salad bar being most often laid out on my grandfather's stereo console in the living room. It was a thing of beauty in the eyes of a child, so much so that to this day I am generally disappointed when I amble up to the leafy offerings of your average family eatery. For an intimate family gathering (four adults, three children) she would of course have lettuce, and then, all cooked and grated, chopped, sliced or otherwise processed by hand - carrot, hard boiled eggs, cucumber, tomato, onion, cheese, croutons, bacon bits, sunflower seeds and about fifty-eight kinds of salad dressing. All fresh and all homemade - not quite the same as ripping open a bag of greens and dumping it into a bowl, is it?

Grandma also had a bona fide dining room and a china cabinet filled with... actual china. These things didn't exist in a home containing three small and highly active children. I can remember staring at the antique cut glass, beautifully painted china and wine glasses, appreciating without quite understanding that these items were special.

Everything about Grandma's house was special. All of her window ledges in the kitchen, downstairs den and office were lined with collected figurines of birds. Looking back, I don't know how she kept them all dust free and neatly aranged. Her kitchen also had a nifty bell on a stand with the oh-so witty "Good bread, good meat, good gosh, let's eat!", she had special glasses just for juice and a toaster on her kitchen table. That made such perfect sense to me that I could not understand why we didn't do it - until Brian laid his arm across our toaster one day and was driven screaming bloody murder to the emergency room.

She and Grandpa laid in a good supply of Jay's potato chips, 7-Up and ice cream before the kids arrived, and she could be counted upon to have fresh cookies, cake and a lemon meringue pie stashed somewhere on special occasions. She taught us "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice scream" with no regard for volume and also introduced us to the concept of drowning innocent ice cream in chocolate. This is the same woman who after Grandpa died thought nothing of tossing a perfectly good steak in the microwave and eating it after the buzzer sounded. I guess she earned that right after all that cooking in the 1950s and 1960s, but the dichotomy amuses me to no end. It may also be why she and "The Colonel" had an ongoing relationship. Grandma's arrival in Texas *always* meant fried chicken.

Her pillowcases had hand-embroidered edges, she would let me try on any of her shoes, she had a collection of beautifully illustrated books about birds, we were allowed to use her tape recorder and binoculars (heady stuff!), she dutifully and thoroughly maintained the photographic history of her family from the 1930s until arthritis kept her from using a camera regularly - and would patiently take the albums down and let us peruse them at will. I don't know how many questions she answered with a smile about our Aunt Jeannie. Aunt Jeannie died when she was just two years old.

Last, but most importantly, she had bits and pieces of Christmas stashed in every drawer and closet in the house. Grandma did not believe there was a such thing as too many Christmas decorations.

Pulling up to Grandma and Grandpa's on a dark night was a magical experience for a small child. But I think I'll save that one for a few more months.