…on things unsaid.

I wish I had more photos

Dear Grandma,

As I get older, the memories fade into smaller and smaller snippets. Sitting on that funny chair in your tiny kitchen that had the stairs on it. The way your fresh butter tarts, right out of the oven, just melted on my tongue. Rows and rows of dusty canning in the porch. The smell of picking a fresh tomato. That little dish of stale hard candies that I ate from non-stop, even though they stuck to my teeth and weren’t even particularly good. Tea, every day at 4pm, and always on the good china.

Sitting at your vanity, trying on all your jewelry, I thought it was the fanciest stuff I had ever seen. (Now that so much if it has come to me, I see it was mostly just brass and painted plastic – but 8-year-old me couldn’t tell the difference. You always wore it with magic and grace.) The way you said yes to everything I asked made me feel like I could be infinitely trusted – like I was good and even if I wasn’t perfect that I was lovable. At your house, I was never afraid of breaking something, of doing something the wrong way, of touching something that was too important for me. It was always summer, or Christmas, and your whole tiny place was filled with the ease of nothing particularly urgent or important to do.

I wish I had asked you to tell me more about your life. I wish I knew more about the newspaper you and Grandpa ran, I wish I had asked you what it was like raising my dad alone in the wilderness, I wish I had understood at the time what a “flop house” was and had asked you more about what a bad-ass partier you were.

I wish I had been around more once I grew up, especially at the end. I wish I hadn’t chosen that shitty boyfriend and my “big city life” over being there while you died. I wish I hadn’t been 23 and so enraptured with my own life that the finality of death felt like the series finale of a show I would be able to watch a million more times, rather than you being really and truly gone.

I wish I had your recipes.

You wouldn’t want me to live in regret. You sure didn’t! There’s so much I feel like I never learned from you, but I know that’s not on the list. I learned that it’s important to unapologetically take time for myself every single day. I learned how to compromise when you deeply love someone. I learned that no thing is more important than any person. I learned that if you just get down to work, it gets done so much faster than complaining about it. (Still working on actually putting that one in practice.)

You would be proud of the mother I’ve become. Proud of the fierce little spirit I’m raising. And I know in my bones, you’d be most proud of all the times I take no shit and proud of all the times I open my arms to unconditional love.

I love you more than I ever told you.

Annika