Grandma Writes

I'm Laurie's mom and Matthew's grandmother, "Grammy".  I had the absolute pleasure of watching him one day this past weekend while Laurie and Bob went out birthday shopping for him.

When I first arrived at the house  Matt gave me a big smile and then proceeded to put on his shy act by turning his head into his mom and clinging to her.

After holding him and standing in the window so he could wave and yell “BYE”, we proceeded into the living room where he promptly walked over to the TV and started jabbering in his baby talk and pointing to the various remote controls on the coffee table. He wanted to watch something, so after fiddling around with all three remotes the TV fired up and a DVD started to play. It was a cartoon about a little boy being watched by his Grandmother and in one scene the Grandmother puts on a record and they dance around the room together.

"DASS - DASS – DASS," Matthew grabbed my hands and pulled me into a type of dance that involved us spinning around and him falling to the floor when the boy in the cartoon would fall down. Afterwards I straightened my back out and sat down on the couch where I thought we could take up reading a book.

"WEE-RIND?” Matthew frantically gestured to the remote controls, “DASS - DASS – DASS!” So we did this over and over.........and over.

Next we went on a wagon ride and while we were walking by a house a gigantic dog came bounding out of nowhere and ran right up to Matt! The dog was friendly - Matt seemed to know him too because when the dog turned around to leave he yelled out, "DOGGY!....BYE!" ".

After that we went home to play in the backyard. He loved it when I crammed myself into his toy house, we had a rock throwing contest, I did the digging and Matt supplied the sound effects - grunt, grunt, grunt - while my foot did the work, and I pushed him around in his plastic car.

When I tucked him into his crib for a nap he proceeded to sing himself to sleep. Later learned that when Matthew had woken up for his nap the first thing he did was look for me.

Journeying

 










When I was growing up my mother and my aunt Gretchen used to take me hiking though the woods behind my grandmother’s house. We would be gone for hours ‘journeying’ as they referred to it. I was entertained by stories of their childhood, like the overgrown path they remembered being a meadow or the fence my mom cut her head open on sledding one winter. We would practice bird calls, watch bull frogs in the ponds, and one early spring day we even came across an ice skating pond.

They terrified me, “I know someone who caught their leg in a bear trap out here and he walks with a limp to this day.” One of my all time favorite childhood memories was when we had stopped for lunch and my mother surprised me with a bag of Cadbury mini chocolate Easter eggs. I remember sitting on top of a hill of hay looking out into the trees while savoring the chocolate taste. We saw broken down cars, abandoned furniture that my aunt said would make a nice sketching, baby birds, and once two black and white baby snakes under a piece of construction wood.

Sometime between when I was eleven and now I have become so afraid of snakes that I feel numb tingles on my legs when I walk anywhere near high grass or piles of old leaves. This year I am trying to be less of an insane person about it and have spent every warm day outside all day with Matthew.

“Will you take him walking in the woods one day when he is older?” I asked Bob one day, looking past him into the patch of woods behind out house at a rusted green car you can make out in the distance. I think of my aunt Gretchen, now living in North Carolina, who would have already hiked out it to and repurposed the metal into wind chimes.


“I don’t know, maybe,” he was distracted at the time that I asked.

When we rake the yard he gives Matthew rides in the wheelbarrow and I can hear the giggling before I see them, come around the back of the house. When the wind blows I can smell a neighbor burning their brush which reminds me of cookouts. In the distance I can hear the playful barking of a dog. I really do love the outdoors, I think I just need to be reminded sometimes.