7-12-12 through my veins

Sam was standing over my jewelry box as I was tidying up getting ready to take her to the airport.

She'd taken the only ring I have of my mother's mother, whom I so often talk about, my mammammy, and put it on her middle finger, surprised that it fit.

I wear it from time to time and always think of her and always shake my head and smile at how it came to be hers, a lost ring my grandfather found among the grass that just happened to fit. I never asked if he'd tried to find the owner or just presented it immediately as a lucky token, finders keepers.

It was the only ring I remember her having, other than her gold graduation ring, the one she always wore.

I have no pictures of her before her one graduation photo at 18. Her mother and father had remarried one another after being widowed, and she was born one of the youngest into a family of many half-brothers and sisters from two sides of two families.  They'd banded together to survive, barefoot in Little Cedar, OK, scraping by.

One of my favorite stories I asked her to tell me over and over was the time she was very young, but her baby brother Ed even younger, and the two of them were sent down the road and over the hill to the mailboxes on the side of the rural road to check the mail. A boon had come. A whole bushel of apples sat there, marked "Holt." But rascally young Ed ran off to tell everyone at home, leaving Jewel to struggle with the horribly heavy basket all the way back home, up the hill, by herself, sending threats down on Eds head the whole way.

When I was little we would visit Little Cedar and I would imagine that walk, so very far from the main road to the place where the house used to be, past the water pump, over the creek, through pasture after pasture.

My hazy memories of "mammammy's house" and of the trips back to Oklahoma are the earliest in a long line of memories of my grandmother. My grandparents came to live with us when I was 5, which provided plenty of time together, enough that I wasn't always the beloved grandchild I could be to my other grandmother. And yet I was beloved. She spoiled me but not rotten. She baked for me and squirreled away treats for me and coddled me when I was sick and told me stories and let me hide under her bed in storms. She runs through my veins.

After her death, when I found so many pictures of my mom as a young girl, with the half of the picture ripped away that had contained my grandmother, and it made me so sad that she would feel that way about herself. She had her own demons, as we all do, but she'd hid them away from me.

Putting together this little tribute, I am struck by so many things, so much that makes me smile and remember. The oldest photos, so grainy, but still I see myself in them, in a posture, or a smile, or those blue eyes. The picture where she is standing balancing a cup on her head, a beer in one hand, and an arm around my mother, who is also trying to hold a cup on her head, is one of my favorites.  The picture of her with the cigarette by herself at the Texas monument looks exactly like me at that angle.

There are just the smallest bits of video of her, during the few years Dad was running the Super8. The Christmas before I was born, there she is, in her den, beside her aluminum tree, showing off those granny panties. Gathering firewood on a vacation when mom is pregnant with me. Helping mom into the house the day I came home from the hospital, always trying to stay out of camera range. The bits at Christmas reminded me of her fondness for wild, colorful prints and the footies she was never without. Playing in the water, riding on the zoo train, lighting birthday candles, opening presents, reading books, she looks back at me with my own eyes. And I miss her. Always. But more today.