I remember Grandma’s great culinary skills; like melting cheese on a plate in the microwave. I didn’t like eating the sauce or bread on a pizza, so instead of even getting the pizza in the first place, Grandma would make me a plate of cheese. It was special to eat it at Grandma’s house because she never complained when she had to clean the burned cheese off the edges of the plate like mom would. Another great culinary dish at Grandma’s was “Grandma soup”, aka Ramen noodles. I remember making homemade noodles with Grandma and getting to turn the lever. We ate the majority of them raw instead of cooking them into soup. She would make me poppyseed kolaches because she knew they were my favorite, or it was a lucky guess because she also called me “Mandy-I-Mean-Sarah!”

Nathan and I stayed at Grandma’s house a lot while dad was farming and sometimes when mom and dad took trips. I liked getting to sleep in Grandma’s bed because she had silk sheets. She would also rub my back with “big circle little dot”. Grandma’s house had cool things like old movies, an outside playhouse, and a driveway full of dirt we could find nails in. It also had a large tree with a great limb for climbing, until we broke it and Grandma yelled at us, probably for coming close to breaking our necks.

The first thing I remember Grandma making for me (I’m sure there are things before this) was the pillow I took to Kindergarten for nap time, it had a kitty on it. And the last thing was the veil for my wedding. We laid out a sheet on the floor downstairs so I could wear the wedding dress without touching the ground, and then we measured how long the veil needed to be. The mesh tulle must have been terrible to see and sew on, but she edged the entire thing in ribbon. On the morning of the wedding when the top clasp of my wedding gown came loose Grandma sewed the gown together with me in it. She gave James a crochet hook to undo the buttons and a stitch ripper to get me out of the gown later.

Grandma got me started scrapbooking. She bought me a book, paper and stickers to start a  wedding album. Scrapbooking helped keep me sane while I was unemployed, newly married, and living in a state far from home. I traveled the book home for Christmas just to share with Grandma.

I remember many road trips where all the seats in the back of the blue van were removed so we could stretch out and color while we traveled. We traveled to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home and walked through an historic town. Grandma traveled to Kentucky to see me during the week of my birthday and we attended a horse race. She came to Nashville for another birthday a few years later.

And when I couldn’t be home I remember Grandma caring for me. I received many care packages from Grandma while I was at school in Kentucky, and also living in Alabama. Sometimes they had household items like vases to decorate my new home in, or scrapbooking pieces. One of my favorite packages was actually sent to James, and contained several chicken feathers for him to ‘plant’ and start his chicken farm. When my favorite pet died she sent me flowers. I called to thank her and she told me she wasn’t good with words to help me through this, but she cried with me on the phone, and told me she loved me.

But what I remember the most in all these memories is Grandma smiling. She is easy to picture sitting at the end of the bar at my parents house, getting ready to take a sip of a gin and tonic, saying that she really shouldn’t drink this, but she doesn’t care because she likes it. And then she smirks a smile because she is going to unapologetically do whatever she wants. She was laughing when she handed James that crochet hook. She was laughing at the horse race and at us eating raw noodles. There were Thanksgiving walks, Easter egg hunts, Christmas gifts, shooting matches, school musicals, and foot surgeries she was there for.There was laughter and beers drank around a card table of tarock cards. I don’t believe there will ever be enough hands of tarock cards to play, or beers to drink, with the ones I love.