by Michelle Grismer

Created on: March 23, 2010   Last Updated: March 24, 2010

The light in my Grandmothers house seemed  a strange pale gray.

Her small modest home has been the backdrop for so many of my favorite childhood memories.

Easter celebrations hiding eggs in her huge yard full of Oleanders and Ginger plants.

My mother and father's wedding under the canopy of Oak tree's in the side yard.

Christmas and New years when the food was so good I would  start dreaming of  all the  wonderful food that  my Grandmother would lay

out for our family weeks before the celebration.

The day my Uncle Lee came home from the War safe and sound.

My grandmothers house was a well kept tribute to the life she shared with my Grandfather.

My Grandfather passed away when i was five years old but I can still see him in my mind.

Kissing my Grandmother's cheek while she stirred a pot on the stove.

They met when the they both were freshly divorced.

My Grandfather had inherited three houses from his Grandmother and Grandmother was his Realtor.

She convinced him to keep the properties and live in one and collect rent on the other two.

After he moved in the two fell in love and the houses have been in the family since.

The three houses were all next to each other with the two smaller rent houses side by side on one lot.

At different times in my life my family and my uncle and aunt and their families lived in these little 600 square foot houses.

They were plain, clean and  very, very old, but close to my grandmother.

As much as Grandmother gave she also took. arguing in my family was as natural as breathing.

My  Grandmother was a writer and could be prone to long periods of isolation in which she would emerge  exhausted but euphoric.

My father, Uncle and Aunt  never quite got her and it disturbed them to no end when I did.

My Grandmother  simply enjoyed her privacy as much as her smothering love for her family both were fine but not in long intervals.

As I stood in the living room in my Grandmothers small house I knew just feet away she was preparing to leave this world.

I thought maybe if I stood there staring down at her burgundy oriental rug, maybe close my eyes, she would round the corner like she 

done so many times before in my twenty five years.

But the reality of what was happening was too real. 

My  Grandmother had stepped in when at eleven my mother decided she needed to leave and leave she did.

She waited until my Dad and I were at school and work.

She took only her clothes and makeup

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