30 tiny moments: day 16
Next month my little family and I will be moving back home. We want our daughter to know her grandparents and that requires living close enough to make visiting realistic. Three-thousand miles is just too far to make frequent travel a possibility.
I grew up 750 miles away from my grandparents, a twelve-hour drive that my family made at least once a year.
Without a mini-van.
Without DVDs.
Without Gameboys.
Without “kid’s music”.
Without frequent bathroom stops or a night in a hotel.
And usually without seat-belts. (Once my older brother and I spent the entire 750 miles curled up in sleeping bags in the back of my dad’s truck. When it started raining, he was kind enough to buy us a tarp. That adventure was truly a highlight of my childhood, but now as a parent it horrifies me.)
Lack of technology notwithstanding, there were still plenty of ways to pass the long, long time in the car.
My brothers and I ate lots of candy and drank sodas (but we called it pop), purchased at 7-11s and truck stops along the way.
We read books, colored, and played the license plate game.
We made pillow beds in the car and napped. I usually ended up trying to negotiate a comfortable rest with the hump on the backseat floor.
And when those things got tiresome, we fought.
It was a long twelve hours. But exciting too, for at the end of the trip lived both sets of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and hours of fun.
Occasionally, if I was lucky, I’d get a night alone with with my favorite Grandma. She had handfuls of grandchildren, but I always felt special to her. And from food to toys, Grandma knew what kids liked.
She kept her fridge stocked with pop and homemade puddings in little tupperware cups, like pudding-packs before there were pudding packs. For dinner, she always made me Cambell’s split pea soup, served on a tv tray while we sat together on the sofa.
After dinner she’d set up the card table for Gin Rummy or Memory and we’d play until time for bed. And then she’d tuck me in on the fold-out couch with a travel-sized pillow beneath my head and a my favorite blanket covering me. It was a blue and white gingham, normally kept in their travel trailer, but brought out special for me. Somehow it felt warm in the winter, but cool in the summer. I loved it.
When Bob and I married twelve years ago, Grandma made me my own blanket.
She remembered how much I liked hers; Grandma was like that.
It is simply made, just stitched together and tied, but I know it was a laborious sacrifice. For by that time, age had taken most of Grandma’s sight and her world was reduced to shadows. I still don’t know how she managed to sew it.
Out of all the wedding gifts we received, that simple blanket has been the most valuable. It has been with us through movie nights, picnics in the grass, the flu, or just when one of needs a little extra comforting. And just like the original, somehow it knows how to be warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
It’s always just right.
Just like my Grandma.
She died two years ago, but her memory lives on in my heart and that bit of blue gingham.
I miss her…
