After some very strong internal urges within my soul to get my arse up to visit my grandma, Chris and I decided to take a very last minute trip up to see her in Louisiana, MO. She has never met our son, Camden, and he is almost a year old. I was having some incredibly strong feelings of guilt about this lately, and we decided that we needed to go see her as soon as possible. She lives high up on a lonely hill, in a small, delicate cottage home, all by herself. She can hardly walk, let alone drive.
Luckily my dad and his sisters visit her often, mostly to check in on her and make sure she is doing ok and doesn't need anything. Although, I don't think she would ever admit to needing anything even if she did.
After grandpa passed away several years ago from lung cancer, her attitude toward the world seems to have changed. She is crisp. She is blunt. And she seems to be over what the world has to offer. Who can blame her though? After the world has taken your one and only love, what is there left to live for? To her, it seems like nothing is left. Not even her art, as she no longer paints at all. The same two unfinished canvases (that grandpa assembed for her), have beeing sitting in the same place in her living room, perched on their easels, untouched, for years since his passing. They are just sitting there, patiently waiting. This seems to be her current strategy in life. Patiently waiting.
We walked into her house after no one answered the door after several minutes of knocking. I found her in her back bedroom on the phone. I didn't want to startle her, and after a few hesitant moments, she finally looked up at me in surprise. "Oh, you'll never guess who just walked in," she said into the phone. "It's Liz and a little boy," she said with a grin.
Tears immediately welled up into my eyes. I felt an immense wave of guilt for taking so long to visit her. I think it had been almost two years since I had seen her. I don't even have a good excuse. I'd like to blame the busyness of life, but even that seems trite to me at the moment.
She and my grandpa were always very simple people. They moved to Missouri from the East coast, and they never had children of their own. They adopted my dad and his two sisters, and never believed in spending money on things. They lived in a small house, up high on a hill deep in the woods, and believed in doing good things for the earth and for other people. My grandpa was a photographer, a poet, and a journalist for a local newspaper, and she was a librarian and a painter. We could only spend a few hours with her and my dad, as we were timing the long drive back home with Camden's afternoon nap.
She was so excited when I told her about me beginning to paint again. I could tell she was trying hard to contain her enthusiasm, as she put her hands together, twister her mouth into a suppressed smile and said under her breath, "Oh I am so glad to hear that. Oh that makes me happy."
She was always my most encouraging supporter when it came to my art. I spent a few minutes taking photographs of her oil paintings (that adorned every square inch her walls), while sneaking in a few portraits of her as well (even though she demanded I leave her out of the frame of my camera).
There is so much mystery surrounding my grandma. There is so much I don't know about her, grandpa, and the story behind my dad and the adoption of him and his two sisters, and the history behind it all. When I've asked questions in the past, it seems painful for people to talk about. No one wants to talk about it at all. I want to dig deeper, but it is not received well. And it kills me. Maybe one day I will have more answers...
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