About Nana

Although my Nana will be 93 in April, in my mind she'll always be about 70 years old. It's hard to think of her any other way than the perspective of the top of her head, her long strides from the stove to the sink as she prepared dinner and talked with my dad, my aunt, my cousins. You could see and hear all that was going on in the kitchen of her house by leaning down and peering through the heating vent in the upstairs bathroom. This was a frequent pastime of mine as a child.

I was also fascinated by her elaborate makeup collection and fancy vanity in her room. I would open up the jars of cold-cream kept there and try to discern how they were used.

Hours and hours and hours were spent on her sun-porch playing with the Noah's Ark and other toys, while Nana alternately watched and cursed the soaps in the afternoons. My Grampy sat in the sun at the end of the long porch and read, usually, or held me in his lap and sang me "The Old Grey Mare," a depressing song to me even at age 6.

I pawed through the boxes of old Grit magazines in her garage, trying to find puzzles I or my cousins hadn't yet solved. I helped my Grampy with the word jumbles and he helped me with the "What's Different?" pictures. Grampy taught me how to play cribbage. Apparently, I Double-Skunked him, though I can't remember what that means. Not sure I knew then.

Nana made corn fritters once for Grampy, and since I was such a picky eater as a kid, she left out the corn in mine.

I remember that as a child I always drank cold milk at Nana's. There was always homemade bread at dinner and raisin-drop cookies at dessert. Each vegetable had a cream/butter sauce on it, so even I ate all my vegetables. Lunch was at 11 a.m. and dinner at 4:30 p.m. since my grandparents were early to bed and early to rise-rs.

"Wasteful ways make woeful wants," Nana said.

Nana has never been good at keeping secrets. As a kid I asked her for a hint about one of my presents and she matter-of-factly informed me as to what it was.

Nana was diagnosed with congestive heart failure two years ago. She had another 'spell' a few weeks ago and breathes with the assistance of oxygen at night now. It's amazing how well she has done considering her prognosis then. I ascribe her toughness to the climate in which she was raised, to stubbornness, to the pragmatic nature of life in the Great North.

I talk about these things in the past tense because they mostly happened in the past. They're really pieces of many different stories I might not ever tell.