From Grandchild
Keepsake necklaces written in your voice, with the words already on the card.
“Nobody else has ever been quite so pleased to see me come through a door. The coffee was on before I had even got my coat off, every single time.”
“Every decent habit I have came from watching somebody else do it first. Most of the time that somebody was my grandmother, standing in her kitchen.”
“No grandmother picks her own name. The grandchildren always decide that one. Ours landed on mimi, and nobody in this house says it without meaning it warmly.”
“The knot you tied in this family has never come loose. It holds through every year, every mile, and every generation that follows.”
“You told me the same story about that summer more times than I can count. I have started telling it to other people now, and I get the details right.”
“You have never once answered the phone and sounded busy, not in my whole life. I know you were. You just put it down every single time I rang.”
“The rules at home and the rules at your house were never remotely the same. You knew exactly what you were doing and you did it with a completely straight face.”
“You taught me to do a thing properly the first time, which I resented enormously. I have since said the same sentence to somebody else, in more or less your words.”
“The table was always too small and you always found room for one more. Nobody left your kitchen hungry and nobody left it feeling unwanted.”
“You kept every dreadful drawing I ever did and put the worst of them on the fridge. They are still in that drawer. I looked. You never threw out a single one.”
“You never made a fuss about anything, and you never missed a single thing. The quiet ones see more, and you have been seeing me clearly my whole life.”
“Grandmother is the word in the dictionary. Gigi is the word in this family. And it has always meant snacks, rescue plans and someone firmly on my side.”
“There are three whole generations between your hands and mine. And every one of them carries something you started long before I arrived.”
“You held this family together through things I only know as stories. And you told them to me so that I would know exactly where I came from.”
“Your house was the one place I never had to knock. And you were the one person always pleased to see me walk in.”
“Mom stirs the pan the way you do. Last week I caught myself doing it too. Nobody wrote it down and nobody had to. Some things just come from you.”
“Everybody else was busy and somehow you never were, not for me anyway. You had the whole afternoon and you spent it listening to a child talk.”
“Half of what I know how to do I picked up standing next to you in a kitchen. None of it was ever written down and you never once measured a single thing.”