This post isn’t about craft or parenting or sewing or art. If you have laundry to fold, you should go do that instead of reading this.

Two weeks ago, my kids had a t u m m y b u g and then I got it and the whole thing left me feeling weak and weirdly sad. And the main thing I was thinking about afterward was how much I miss my grandmother, Nanu. As a child, she was my in-town grandma. She would brush my hair with a way-too-stiff bristle brush for hours on end– til it felt like silk. And I would run to the mirror to see how beautiful I looked with silk hair, but it never really looked very pretty. It only felt pretty and so, so smooth. She could scrub a pan til the plating came off. She was maniacal and obsessive and controlling and I loved her so much…all one hundred pounds of her. So tiny.

We were just watching the Cars movie in preparation for the upcoming release of Cars 2 and that old-fashioned car named Lizzie started talking and all I could picture was Nanu. And I just started crying and crying. My baby daughter started saying, “mommy sad…mommy sad.” And the big boy handed me the tip of the down comforter and said “here is a tissue, mommy.” I always cry when I watch Cars. We have seen it over fifty times. But I never cry because of Lizzie. I always cry because of that montage scene when they show Radiator Springs in its heyday before Route 66 is bypassed by the fancy new interstate. And then again, I cry when Lightning pushes The King to the finish line because he has learned the value of kindness and friendship.

And the thing is, I am talking about Nanu in the past tense. But she is very much alive. 94 years old. Living in a nice care home in Florida. I speak to her, but not very often. I think she is happy to hear my voice when we speak. I speak to her as though she was my child. I speak to her about impatiens and colius and all the pretty flowers she used to love to grow in her garden, because I know she remembers those flowers. They are far enough back in her memory that she still holds on to them. They haven’t been erased by the Groundhog Day-esque vacuum filter sucker that sucks up all her immediate thoughts the moment she has them. I have been mourning her loss for more than 5 years. And it still hurts. I still miss her…who she used to be.

She was the buyer for a women’s clothing boutique and she flew to New York many times a year…well into her seventies. The whole town relied on her to dress them. She just had an eye. And don’t think she didn’t turn that eye on the rest of us. When I came home from college with one ear pierced twice she looked at it and then she said, “Now, what does that mean? Doesn’t that mean something?”

But I have my memory…and there are hundreds of smells and sounds and feelings I can recall about her house. I remember that she lined Papa Dave’s pipe drawer with tin foil…and the way that drawer smelled. I remember the sound of the window-unit air conditioner in the upstairs bedroom where we would spend the night and her sunny yellow kitchen wallpaper and where she stored her Hall mentholyptus. I remember almost every thing in her every room, every knick knack, every photograph. And I hold all of that in my heart. She had this way of adopting all of her young twenty something neighbors and caring for them as if they were her children. It was a lovely quality. She would look out for them, feed them if necessary, and water all of their plants while they were at work.

I feel bad…no, I feel very, very bad about mourning her even though she is still alive. But the woman I admired so much, the woman who loved and cared for me and so many others, has been gone for a long time….since Papa Dave died. I think I can understand a love like hers. I think she climbed into his grave with him. And that was that.

I have more to say…so much more. But I’ll stop here for now.