Dear Grandma,

January 20, 2016

Before you send me a box with one of your bibles in it, you write and ask for my permission.

"I would be honored... This makes me feel very sad though, the idea of you not needing one of your bibles. It still seems possible to me that you and Grampa will live forever. And you will, in other ways…" I write back.

My body built a person with a soul inside her and a heart with blood-filled veins and valves and breath that blows in and out of her little lungs like the breeze through summer trees, and since then I have felt a desire for the Divine, for prayer again. I’d also like for my children to have a foundation of faith, a precious place where they can explore peace and prayer. And I told you all this in my letters. -You raised nine children: eight your body made from scratch and one you had flown to you in a white steel stork of propellers, peanuts and smiling, skirted stewardesses.

Thirty-two years ago, your eldest died at sea, widowing his wife, Mary and leaving behind my cousins, young Sarah, Daniel and Tommy. I was in my mother’s womb then, due to be born five months later in early November. In high school, I wrote a paper about your mother. I interviewed you, you probably don’t remember. The title of my essay was "Sunny wasn't always..." I wrote mostly about the poverty of her upbringing and her depression, which we discussed in your sunlit living room, but I think I also wrote about her flower paintings and Cape Cod landscapes, the eggs she'd hollow out and paint as ornaments with teeny Christmas scenes inside their fragile eggshell walls and the crèches she'd mold out of clay. I probably confessed to you then how whenever we’d visit Sunny’s home after church on Sundays when we were kids ---after playing with Monkeys in a Barrel and staring at Grand’s bed, trying to see if we could see his ghost hovering above it, I’d fill my corduroy jumper pockets with those thick chalky mints, popping them into my mouth one after another during the short drive home, giving me the breathe of a secret cigarette smoker or a teenager on a date at the movies. I can't recall how it came up, but you spoke of Steve. You told me how after he died you began attending mass every morning. Today, between the soft thin pages of the bible you mail me, there is a prayer card and on it in blue ink you've written, Steve’s Prayer.

I am home in Heaven, dear ones;
Oh, so happy and so bright!
There is perfect joy and beauty
In this everlasting light.
On the front of the card is a picture of Jesus. He is in a long white robe with shadowed creases and his hair is long and dark. He stands amidst clouds, looking toward a magnificent light above him.

There is work still waiting for you,
So you must not idly stand;
Do it now, while life remaineth-
You shall rest in Jesus' land. 

Grandma, you are a worker, and you are a maker, a terrific baker, a skilled knitter, an incredible cook, a trained nurse and you’re a wise ol’ woman with incredible wit and New England charm. You've made me mittens and cookie crisps, a wool hat, and a turquoise table runner, you’ve boiled me creamy clam chowder, built me a wreath out of beach shells, you’ve baked me baskets of dinner rolls, grilled me fish, served me salad from your vegetable gardens and simmered left over Thanksgiving supper in your famous "Garbage Soup." You made my daughter a quilt out of colored cotton elephants and flowers and giraffes, a yellow blanket of yarn and a royal blue knit sweater with a row of white hearts. And in 1954, you made me my mother and in 1983, my mother made me. In 2015, I made my own little girl, and so, in a way, it’s like you made us all three.

Remember when you had the farm in Vermont with all those sheep and hens and the pond where we'd ice skate and the long slope where we'd sled? Of course you remember. We never do let you forget, do we? I remember my big slip-on rubber boots with velcro that I’d fold over puffy snow pants and a long red/pink/purple/lime-green/yellow polyester coat. I remember shoving my feet beneath the curled wood of the toboggan with a frozen rope between my mitten hands. I remember sitting on hay barrels watching that guy with orange hair sheer all your sheep. I remember your loom at the top of the iron spiral staircase with thread poised like colored harp strings. I remember spools and spools of fuzzy thread. I remember the enormous kitchen table and the woodstove where we’d hang our icy mittens, hats, scarves and socks. I remember standing beside you in that kitchen one afternoon, sneezing, then immediately vomiting all over the counter. I remember carrying unfertilized eggs from the henhouse to the refrigerator and standing alone in the cold light, while I considered keeping one of them. I could warm it and wait for it to hatch, I plotted. …But how would I keep a chick secret on the four-hour drive home? Impossible. So I placed them all in the cold box to complete a half dozen bird abortions...or so I thought. I remember driving your red lawn mower around the yard and dropping from the rope swing into the cold river. I remember camping out in the sheep fields for a weekend family reunion some summer. Everyone else brought tents, while my parents towed a rented pop-up camper behind our blue mini-van and everyone laughed at us, especially when we showed them our nose and mouth masks for trips to the stinky porter potties. We fished in the packed pond with stick poles and during the brisk north New England mornings the great-uncles would build up the bonfire and cook breakfast. There was a torrential rainstorm that weekend and Nettie ran through it with her girls, their blond wet hair sticking to their smiles and foreheads. During your quietest evenings you'd make wool into yarn and yarn into sweaters and blankets and mittens and scarves and hats. I remember your golden retriever, your woodpile, your albums of old photographs in pages of plastic pockets. I remember you treading water in your navy blue bathing suit off the back of the boat in a bay off a beach, while we cannon balled and dove in beside you, splashing your sunglasses.

A couple months ago at Christina and Andrew's wedding I hid in the bathroom because my baby wouldn’t stop crying. You came in and sat with me, offering your calm presence. Later in a letter, I wrote that the reason she was crying was because I had forgotten to change her all day. I had worried so much about her sleep and milk that I forgot entirely about the third most constant baby need -diapering! My generation is so proud of our progress. Our red WARNING labels and the hospital nurse DO and DO NOT lists: "back is best but remember tummy time and don't sleep with your baby! and remember Skin-to-Skin and, whatever you do... DO NOT LET YOUR NIPPLE BECOME A PACIFIER!”, ---we have followed these as best we can, but I like to ask you. For your wisdom could fill textbooks and diaper bags and bottles and booties, but instead they live inside your memories and spoken stories, kept in something like an antique thread cabinet with glass doors and brass knobs, every thought twined around spools, placed in rows and organized by hue.

Years ago you started telling your children that if there was something of yours that they'd like one day, they should put a sticky note under it with their name on it. This made some laugh and some so anxious and sad that they scolded you for being so morbid. But, you have lots of lovely things and so the inheritance-claiming-via-sticky-notes commenced! But I say we put a sticky note on the sole of your soul!, -ask you to stitch it on there with twine and super glue and a few Hail Mary’s. I want you to visit me with your golden-white crocheted wings and gown of dark blue that shimmers like the Atlantic, pink cheeks, bright eyes, Keds with folded white socks and a string of the prettiest little pearls. Grampa too, he with his wings of varnished maple wood, his olive green captain cap, gold wristwatch and a robe made of beach sand that reaches his boat shoes and sprinkles sea salt wherever he walks. Of course, I understand you both will be quite busy in your blessed bliss. But whenever the moment arrives when the hem of your heartbeats frays and tears into an unmendable wound and your sweet soul slips out and soars for the heavens, know that those you leave living will all be clutching the wool you have so carefully stitched around our skin and spirits, feeling forever the work and warmth of your tightly woven love.

When that work is all completed,
He will gently call you Home;
Oh, the rapture of that meeting,
Oh, the joy to see you come!
Love to you and Grampa,

Rachel











*Safely Home by: Priests of the Sacred Heart, Sacred Heart Monastery, www.poshusa.org *