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| Flowers from my mother's garden |
We called my dad's mother "Lollie." She made my sister and me matching Easter dresses every year. I remember feeling unfairly tortured with pins sticking me all over during the dreaded fitting. I also remember my dad taking movies of every Easter egg hunt around, and in, Lollie's beautiful gardens.
A teenage memory:
My mom's mom was "Deedie" to everyone since childhood, as she was the oldest of 10 children who had difficulty pronouncing "Lydia." When I was 13, I endured the tragedy (to me, then) of a family move from El Paso to Baton Rouge. It was like moving to a strange country, and we moved in March, at the end of the school year. I was beyond bereft. My parents wisely suggested that I might want to make a summer trip (my first pilgrimage?) back to visit Deedie, and they said I could stay as long as I wanted to stay. I spent six blessed weeks with her, learning how to sew, visiting homebound people from her church, canning plum jam from the fruit of her trees, getting hooked on my first soap opera, and staying up past 8:00 every night to watch the Tonight Show with her. My parents finally had to call and insist I come home!
A young adult memory:
When I was 24, my mother became a grandma for the first time when my son was born. I loved sharing my newborn children and my new mommy feelings with her. She wanted to be called "Gran Gran" as her maternal grandmother had been to her. My mother is a wonderful grandmother. All of her grandchildren have made regular pilgrimages to the fantasy world fondly known as "Camp Gran Gran."
