Ordinary Days

My toes almost touch the branches with every swing. I stretch some more.
 

Almost there.

 

 

Two wrinkled hands push my swing and off I fly.
 

Got ‘em!
 

It’s October 1979. I’m seven years old and swinging the afternoon away on a wooden swing hanging from my grandmother’s clothesline. I'm wearing a faded orange homemade pumpkin costume that my Gram unearthed from an old box in her attic a few hours before.

“Arms up, there you are,” she’d said with satisfaction as the green felt collar hugged my neck, “I made this for your mommy when she was little.” She tugged the draw string that pulled the costume tight about my waist and instructed, “Now when you wear this, just put on a green shirt and green pants and stuff this with newspaper to make yourself fat and you’ll be the cutest pumpkin!”

That was my Gram. Always giving instructions, always telling others the way things go. She’d been a teacher for over forty years but just because her classroom was gone didn’t mean her knack for taking command of everything else around her was. The wall above her desk was a testament to that, covered with plaques and certificates: president of this, chairperson of that; she always found a way to boss people around in a way that made them grateful she had.

Hours later I was still wearing the costume as the evening light faded. Kids do that, wear costumes as regular clothing every chance they get. My mom would be here soon, plodding around the corner of Gram’s old white house, walking on the lawn that was more clover and violets than grass, telling me to hurry up and then laughing when she noticed me wearing a piece of her childhood.

My Gram wasn’t really my grandmother, she was my great grandmother. Women had babies young in my family. My own grandmother was still in her mid-forties, my mother her mid-twenties. Gram was pushing seventy, so she just played grandma to all of us.

I don’t remember why I remember that ordinary day so vividly. The costume, the swing, the violets. I just do.

 

But isn't that what life is? A string of ordinary days woven together. Sure some milestones stand out more: weddings, the birth of children and grandchildren. But the truth of our lives when all is said and done is found in the mundane ordinariness. That's where the beauty lives, the breathes we took together, the smiles we shared, the simple summer afternoons spent on a backyard swing.  

It's 1989 now in my memory.
 

I’m bounding through Gram’s cluttered porch and can see her through the dusty lace curtains, rising slowly from her recliner and exclaiming, “My girlie is here!” She’s wearing her typical polyester dress and nylons with open-toed sandals. Her red hair is freshly colored and we eat cake doughnuts in her kitchen. She asks about things like what college and I am going to and if I’m going to be a singer.

Gram always loved to hear me sing. She’d come to every concert I gave throughout high school, perch in the front row and record my performances on her prehistoric tape recorder. She’d play them back later while she sat alone in her house. Smiling to herself as she read her tattered bible or clicked her crotchet needles.

It was a nice way to grow up. Having a devoted fan like that.

 

I still have all of those cassette tapes Gram made of my singing. They stay close to me, on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, reminding me always that there once was someone on this earth who not only loved me enough to make poor quality recordings of my voice in a high school gymnasium but to play them back to herself when she needed reminding that she may be alone in the old white house but she was not alone in this life.

And now, all these years later, I wish the recordings were not of me.

But of her.

Gram died when I was 25. Her fiery spirit faded like the red in her hair. The last time I sang to her was in a church.

But she couldn’t hear me anymore.

It’s been so long since I’ve heard her voice or seen her wrinkled smile but that doesn't mean I don't visit her often. I close my eyes and fling open the porch door of the big white house and rush inside to visit  my Gram. I swing on that swing, walk in the violets and clover, and sit with her at her sunny kitchen table and eat cake doughnuts with her again.

Long after her laughter faded, her love for me did not. She walked with me through the jarring reality of my divorce in my mid-thirties, the resulting uncertainty I felt in the years following as a single mother, and she even held my hand this summer when I walked down the aisle for a second time, her crocheted handkerchief encircling the prairie flowers in my bouquet, rejoicing with me at the love I had finally found.

For she has always been and will always be my biggest fan, my unwavering support, pushing my swing higher and encouraging my toes to touch the tree tops.
 

The lesson she imprinted on my life is eternal, that love's simple power is all we need to inject extraordinary magnificence into all of our ordinary days.

*************************************

Love you, Gram. Miss you . . . always. ~Your girlie

(This post was originally published in 2010. It was updated in September 2013 to include my newest life event that Gram shared with me - my marriage to my soul mate and best friend, Matthew Mehl. I wish she could have met him in this life - but I have no doubt she will in the next. And she will love him just as much as I do.)