The Things I Remember

I lost my Grandma Jayne two years ago today.

We never had much of a relationship because she lived in upstate New York, a seven-hour drive from my hometown, but what we did have got more and more interesting as we both got older.

She didn’t “do computers,” so I would send her letters filled with photos of what we were up to. She never got to meet my children in person, but she saw and heard about their antics on paper, which was probably for the best, since loud kids weren’t her favorite thing in the world.

Grandma Jayne was a product of a different time. She dressed up for dinner, which she ate late in the evening—around 8pm even when we visited as children. She wore funky jewelry, painted her toenails bright red, and spoke her mind loudly and without hesitation. I always picture her wearing a fancy dress and pearls, poking a pot roast with a meat thermometer, while sipping something amber-colored out of a short glass and yelling something important to someone in the other room. She drank coffee and read the paper in the morning. She was relentlessly proper.

Yet, she gave birth her first child in a cottage in the woods—without a doctor and in the middle of a horrible storm. She was married for thirty years to a Republican lawyer with a background in politics, and then, when that didn’t work out, she married the sweetest, most charming Democrat, a man who loved me and my sisters as if we were related by blood. (Maybe that’s how I knew adopted love is real love.)

She wore her second wedding dress—a swooshy teal number that I remember watching her walk down the aisle in when I was three—to my wedding twenty years later and looked just as amazing in it.

She changed the spelling of her name from Jane to Jayne when she was a teen to make it more interesting. 

We had almost nothing in common, but, when it’s your grandmother, that stuff doesn’t seem to matter.

You just love each other, in your own way, for exactly who you are.