Ninety Eight Years Later

Sometimes it is so random the memories that pop up.

​Tomorrow it will be ninety-eight years since my maternal grandparents married.  My grandfather died before I was born.  My grandmother passed in '83, shortly before I bought the house I live in now.  I often wonder what she would have thought of it.  I'm sure the way I moved around while in college she probably never believed I would put down roots.  Actually, until I bought the house, I can almost guarantee she thought I would move back to Michigan someday.  The purchase of this house changed both our expectations and hopes.

My grandmother was very good at helping me know my grandfather.  He was a good man, good to his family.  He had a minor cleft palet and died of cancer.  I remember my grandmother telling me how he would lie in his sick bed at their cottage at the lake and listen to the children playing and the birds singing and cars going by outside.  "I hate just lying here," he would say to her.

He died in 1946.  Seventy years ago.  My grandmother remarried in '48 and moved back to the suburbs of Detroit.  When I came along, I'm sure I fast became her favorite.  At least I was the closest.  Her son lived not too far away but married into the Jevovah Witness faith and between that and his wife, a wedge was driven between her and his children.  She lavished her attention on me.  

I guess I am thinking about this right now because of the anniversary tomorrow.  As I wrote the other day, that is what anniversaries are about.  They help us to remember the important events of our lives.  Happy anniversary, Norm and Lucy.  You remind me that love always lives on.  

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