Let me tell you how to shake up a boring afternoon. Hint: it might include a visit to your local nursing home. Surprised? Read on.
Note: It really has very little to do with the title of this blog.
Between school quarters, I had some spare time (hence the Idle Hands allusion, and the end of our connection with said title) and availed myself of the opportunity to drive up to my maternal grandmother's house in Marysville. I've called her "Grandma Oregon" my entire life because she lived in Oregon when I was growing up, and somehow we started calling her that - who knows why ... it's irrelevant.
Allow me to proceed, lest I lose your interest; I drove to her house during the heat wave and enjoyed some grapes and plums while we sat in her relaxingly cool living room and chatted (these are additional irrelevant facts, but English teachers alway say that mundane and realistic facts help to create a more realistic story, hence the inclusion of mundane and realistic facts in my very real story).
"I sure was ornery back then," Grandma Oregon said. She chuckled as she remembered her orneriness. "I was riding a bike with my friend, I think I was on the handlebars. She was going on and on about the Catholics, how awful they were, when I just up and said, 'I'm Catholic!' She sure hushed up right then! Then I told her, 'No, I'm not Catholic, I'm Christian,' he he!" My ornery little grandma laughed. I loved it.
She went on: "I always went to those prank stores, you know. I bought one of those cushions... Oh, but I'm getting ahead of myself! A salesman came to the door once, I don't know if he was the Fuller Brush man or an insurance salesman - I think he was an insurance salesman [note the irrelevant, but realistic fact]. Anyway, he knocked and I said, 'Come in if your nose is clean!' And I had put one of those cushions, you know, the kind you blow, they go Pthhh!! I put one on the couch and he sat down on it, and PGHTPHBLPPPP!!! His face got so red!! He was so embarrassed!" She could hardly continue on she was laughing so hard. "Bernice, my older sister was so angry, but he was so embarrassed!"
It took a moment to recover from the memory, and she continued: "I got one of those cups, it looks like crystal with a pattern on it; but in the pattern there is a tiny hole. I served some wine or something, oh and I was old enough to know better! They got it all over themselves and they were so angry, they said 'This is a new shirt!'"
She recalled a moment of humor with my older cousin, Chris. "When Christopher was just a little kid, he hid those jelly snakes (you know, the candy ones), in between the tissues in my box of Kleenex. I was dusting one day, I dusted just one room a day you know, and I must have been going to sneeze because I reached for a tissue and I felt something there and I just jumped!! I called Christopher and said, 'I found a jelly snake in my Kleenex!' He just said-" and her voice got very serious, "'I wondered when you were going to find those.'"
So, dear reader, go visit your Grandma.
Who knows what you'll learn?
Truly,
Mrs H
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