Yesterday my favorite waitress Debra swung by the table to take my order, one that she already knew. I noticed Debra had a deep tan in the dead of winter, except for the white skin right around her eyes that gave her the look of an ocelot, and when she came back with my black coffee she told me she’d been on a vacation to Antigua. “I loved it—didn’t take the grandkids this time. I’m 59. Almost 60! Can’t take the screaming.”
59. My age.
“Do you have grandkids?” she asked me.
“No,” I said, startled. When Debra brings my coffee, she often pats my head or my shoulder. She calls me sweety or sugar or honey. I get that feeling my ex-husband used to call “Are you my mother?”
Learning that she was exactly my age, and that she knew I was old enough to have grandkids, snapped me to reality. Someone who is exactly your age cannot be your mother, even if they smile warmly at you when they see your face.
I still think of grandmothers as the ones that I had and absolutely cannot imagine myself as one. It’s the situation of having children later than my Idaho classmates that keeps me locked in mother-not-grandmother mode. I still wear mini-skirts, savagely pluck out gray hairs, and wear bold red lipstick even when I’m just home with my dog. In my mind’s eye, I am approaching middle age. But this is just denial. I’m plenty old enough.
My Grandma Hilma never wore make-up or heels. She permed her gray hair, her only concession to vanity.
My concessions to vanity are numerous. Even though I was shocked by the waitress asking me about grandchildren, I am old enough, and my life is looking more like my grandmother’s life. Like her, I am divorced, and like her, I now live in a small house, just me and a ferocious golden retriever.
Grandma lived alone in a small house on a quiet street. She was always standing there at the door when we came to visit, at the ready, with the aroma of melting butter in the air. We crowded around her kitchen table, and she waited on us, fed us, usually a pot roast, potatoes — boiled or mashed and glistening with butter, cooked peas, rolls, a salad of iceberg lettuce and wedges of tomato. When my kids come to visit, if there’s an aroma of food cooking in the air, it’s for the dog (ok, perhaps I exaggerate, but let’s just say we are no strangers to Colony Pizza).
The other room of her tiny house, besides an antiseptically clean bathroom and a bedroom that smelled like laundry, was a living room, where two bookshelves were packed with books, and where a Van Gogh reproduction hung opposite an imposing and enormous photograph of her parents. This room telegraphed to me that she was an intelligent, well-read woman, one who loved books, art, and family history.
Her steep backyard followed the ascent of an Idaho hillside. She grew mint outside her door, and a grape arbor, two apple trees, a pear tree, a sumac, a pine, and a crabapple tree comprised her back yard. In between the apple trees, she kept a vegetable garden. She canned pears, which I gorged myself on during visits.
She always seemed like a woman loaded with common sense, who made practical use of her yard. But my cousins Terri, Julie and Ila reminded me that her real love was of flowers. Grandma Hilma grew clematis and roses by the back door, holly on the living room porch, and poppies by the stone wall. Years later, in a scrap album she kept of her young adulthood, I found a brochure she’d saved about a course in landscape architecture. But that wasn’t to be, except in the glory of her yard. After a stint working in Chicago as a cook, she returned to her hometown of Amasa, Michigan, to care for ailing parents. In her late 20’s she married Jack, an error that nevertheless gave her four children she loved.
When I moved to my little house that I affectionately call “the bungalow,” I didn’t see the connection at first to my grandmother. How I ended up so much like her in this important way of shedding a shared life for a solitary one, in living alone, for better and for worse. I understand now from my cousins that Grandma (Hilma?) was sometimes lonely, that her life bloomed when we walked through the door. Grandma never talked about loneliness. I didn’t know much, if any, of her story when I was growing up. She never talked much about herself, only listened to our stories about our lives. That’s what I knew about grandmothers; listening is what a grandmother does best.
Debra saw the truth of me. I am old enough to be a grandmother, even if I’m not lucky enough to actually be one. It’s time to accept my place in time, my mortality, and the reality of my book-filled bungalow. From my grandmother, I know that even the tiniest of houses can hold a wealth. It will look different here—more pizza than pot roast, more red lipstick than red roses. It’s only the love that will be the same.