Tight Hugs, and French Toast!

So as i sit here thinking about why I am back in my hometown and what is going on and how it is going to affect me and the rest of my life... I realize just how important life is.

I can type my feelings much better than I can speak them, so I am going to attempt to put how I am feeling into words in this post...

My Grandma, pronounced, Grammaw passed away on halloween. SHe had been in a nursing home for a couple of years suffering from what the Doctors could only assume was Alzheimers Disease.

I lost someone very special this week and am full of guilt over having not seen her for almost two years.I know what many of you might say to that, but I still stayed away...I shouldnt have.

The last time I saw her she was not speaking, she was in and out of it for the entire visit. resorting back to her childhood and then back to an imagined present day full of dreams.

I dont want to remember her like that. The woman I remember was a woman that had a smile that made me feel like the world was ok, she had a cute giggle/chuckle when she got tickled about something and a sense of humor that understood me. I got my dry wit from her as did my mother, uncles, cousins, and sisters...She knew how to laugh at herself and could take a joke. She also knew how to let us know that we had put on a few pounds when she saw us, She was "just sayin"...but she never meant it to offend us, it was her way of looking out for our health.

She attended her church every sunday, living close to it, she would take a glass of cold water for the preacher and knew everything about every person that attended. She is probably yelling, right now, at the person responsible for making the decision to close her beloved little church from heaven.

She tried fried okra, southern style, in her eighties, and LOVED it!!! She loved my parents preacher and his wife and while she was living with my Mom in SC before going into the nursing home, she made sure to be at church on Sundays to see them.

She had the coolest car in the world, a 68 or 69 chevy nova, it rocked!!! and alot of my early memories were made inside of that car, including her rolling the window up on my fingers one time.

She was always home and we never had to knock on her door, we just walked on in and she would be waiting for us, she would hug each of us so tight we almost couldnt breathe, but we knew it was because she loved us soo much. she made great pumpkin pie, and made me french toast for breakfast when i would stay with her.

I remember lying in the grass in her yard and rolling down the hill and laughing as she sat under the tree with my Pap-pap watching us, probably laughing herself silly at us.

We all got treated the same, my cousins and my sisters and me, she was close to each of us, the same, yet seperately. Sadly as i got older my visits declined and years would go by between my trips to her house, but it was always the same, the sound of her screen door opening, the smell of her back porch, the kitchen light she had to jump up to tap on to get the wires to connect, the butter cookies she kept in the cabinet above the stove in the white cookie bucket, the peanut butter eggs she made at easter and the Gobbs (to hard to explain) she made randomly for us and her pumpkin pies and french toast...the sound the chairs in her kitchen made as they slid across the floor, I can still hear my Uncle John's Gremlin pulling up and getting excited that my cousins Mickey Joey and Jeremy were coming, opening aunt MarySue's stockings at Christmas and Grandma's Pumpkin Pie.. all memories now...I miss my Grandma, I miss my Pap-pap, I miss my uncle John...I know death is part of every life, I know that with each death a part of us changes and I am just trying to figure out how much of me will change now too.

My Grandma Reba was one of the people that molded me into the person I am today and every time I tie my shoes, I will remember her being proud of me when I tied them when I was five and taking me with her to Super Shoes to try on shoes just to practice. (something I had forgotten until just now).

She is gone now and my memories are all I have left in my head,but those hugs, those tight hugs she gave us like she didnt want to let go, I can still feel. I hope I always feel them...

Rest In Peace Grandma, Tell Pap-pap and John I love them. Keep your perms rolled on pink rods and be amoung the first people I see when I finally show up, hopefully late, to Paradise! I LOVE YOU!!!