Grandma Williams and me.
My Grandma Williams was an amazing woman. Born in 1911, she was the oldest of many children and lived in a rural area. She attended school in an old brick building that is still standing and serves as the Townships garage. I hear she was at the top of her class and was great at Latin.
Of course that is all stuff I learned after she died. As a child all I knew was she was the grandma with cookies on the counter, Popsicles in the freezer and homemade bread raising on the counter-top. I would pinch some dough from her bread when I thought she was not looking! She once told my mother that I could live on flour and eggs.
Grandma was a depression grandma. Not the Prozac kind, but the era when nothing was wasted and everything was used multiple ways. This philosophy also made her color-blind apparently as her color choices were not always matching and her fondness of bright pink was obvious! She made my mom cloth diapers out of old clothes, made my brother and I some hideous looking pajamas (they worked well as pajamas, but they were made from some really ugly material).
The only time I can remember being mad at Grandma was when she made me tie a piece of yarn to my favorite cowboy boots to help me remember which foot was my right foot. I loved those colorful red boots and the orange-red yarn made them so ugly.
With her having seven children and thirteen grand-kids, time alone with grandma was to be treasured. I loved spending the night with her and sleeping in her big bed. Of course that was also were I learned breasts can actually touch your knee caps and now I know that this is genetic. I also marvel at the wonders of God that can make me the exact duplicate of my mother, yet make my profile look so much like my paternal grandma.
Grandma nursed her babies, just like me. Was she an on-demand feeder or a scheduler? I have a feeling that she was an on-demand feeder like myself. She had a soft spot for babies that was evident and I am a Lactation Consultant (hopefully, test still pending!). She was an adoptive mom to one of her kids through a kinship adoption. What would she have thought of my Ethiopian adoption? I hope we are alike in even more ways, I am pretty sure I am.
I canned for the first time this year. I made homemade bread from scratch and ate some dough as it raised. I reduce, reuse and recycle. Those mean different things today then a hundred years ago, but it brings me closer to grandma. I adore hearing about how cheap she was and how she liked a sale. These things make me think about her more and feel closer to her.
I miss my grandma. It is cruel how our beloved grandparents are often gone before we can know them on an adult level. Life is like that though and I must learn what I can from stories and pictures and continue the traditions she started in me.
I would love to have those pajamas still. I would make my girls wear them and laugh at the complaints of their ugliness!
Here is my brother in the pajamas I spoke off...sorry dude, I cannot find one of me in them!
Now that I look at them again, maybe they are kinda cool looking!
