December’s skies were gray, temperatures frigid, the year I returned home from college in time to witness my grandmother’s descent into a sullen funk.
Let’s go shopping, said my mother.
Grandma sighed as we reached for our winter jackets and headed for the car.
You need a new coat, she said, eyeing my current one.
I shrugged.
Find one today, and I will pay for it, she said, abruptly closing the car door.
History, if nothing else, had taught me three things:
1. Shopping was an unsuccessful method in dealing with Grandma’s mood swings.
2. This shopping spree would not end well, given her inevitable post-spending slump.
3. Grandma’s gifts were wrapped up in perplexing strings. Cords I was never able to untangle.
As we traipsed through the mall, I found the perfect coat. Soft brown suede with a stylish hood. Attractive, comfortable, and warm.
This one? Grandma wrinkled her nose.
I nodded.
Her small eyes narrowed as she flipped through the display rack: empyrean blue, blood red, pea green, Windsor plaid, all the while muttering a repetitive buh-buh-buh as she searched.
I reminded myself to be polite and respectful, while simultaneously bracing for the customary insults.
As a college undergrad, I did not have words for her petulance, a poison that bubbled within, seeds of bitterness that grew tall and tangled as they were coddled, watered, and nurtured. Weeds springing from pools of pain: tender bruises pressed down, buried, and left to run wild. Untended wounds that festered and resurfaced with a mighty kaboom in old age, scalding.
Our family’s modus operandi was to dismiss her attitudes with a shrug, a wave of the hand: It’s just who she is!
I had been silently trained that my only recourse in dealing with Jekyll and Hyde was to whistle in the dark, going along as though my grandmother’s unkindness was perfectly acceptable. This woman who claimed to be a Christian.
My mind toyed with a different truth, weaving its way through stories shared by college friends who detailed shopping trips with their grandmothers. Afternoons of laughter, hugs, tea, pastries.
Imagine!
Soft, twinkly-eyed grandmas whose chief delight was spoiling their favorite girls, offering sage advice, while putzing around the mall, gifting, with no strings attached.
These, said Grandma, pulling me from my reverie, as she spread a trio of coats across the racks, are far more flattering.
As I glanced at the brown suede favorite atop my arm, Grandma simpered, staring at my French braid.
You really do need a haircut, she said.
So much for whistling in the dark. I blinked hard, fingering the ends of my braid.
In the end–and who knows why–Grandma bought the suede coat, which I wore for years.
Sewn inside the pockets were punishing memories, sharp as glass.
In hindsight, I see the truth.
God was near, calling and keeping and tending my heart. By placing me in a small furnace of affliction, with a suffering I never would have chosen, he taught me the importance of loving my future grandchildren well.
God granted me a broad, sweeping mural of how sin, unmortified, destroys.
What Satan intended for evil, God used for my good.
This fall, I went shopping with my daughter and granddaughter, a precious munchkin now seven months old. As we perused the racks, I found the one: the perfect winter coat for my little love. A soft, pretty, one-piece fleece. While my little miss is too young to give her approval, her Mama did. My granddaughter looks like a little button as she smiles in her winter accoutrement.
My sweet baby girl is an undeserved gift from God.
The day will come when she will want to choose her own coat, and I am already forming plans.
May I bless her with ears to hear her voice, eyes to read her heart, and lips to encourage. May we laugh, a zest of joy atop our shopping adventures, complete with pastries. May she trust me to fully listen, to speak wisely, to pray for her, and to write words of kindness and goodness across the tablet of her soul.
I was at the park with my grandson last week, a four-year-old delight who is quite the wordsmith, borrowing, experimenting, and peppering our conversations: cottage, swelter, famished, toasty, first down, rambunctious.
I am smitten.
The two of us glided through the air on old-fashioned swings, practiced layups with the junior-sized basketball, and perfected our spirals with his beloved football (Listen Nonnie, he said after catching a pass, the crowd is cheering!)
I hovered at ground level while he climbed fearlessly to the tippy top of the skyscraper jungle gym.
A cold wind swept in and I shivered.
Want your jacket, Buddy? I hollered.
No, Nonnie, he said. I’m warm.
I draped his coat across my arm and patted it. Soon, it will no longer fit.
Shielding my eyes from the sun’s glare, I smiled as he yelled: Watch me climb, Nonnie! Look at me!
I pumped my arm and clapped.
We dug in the dirt with sharp sticks, collected a heap of acorns and pinecones, and moved rocks to form a circle, as we roasted marshmallows, browning them over our imaginary fire pit. He told me about a girl at preschool who threw mulch on his head.
She roared at me, Nonnie, he confided.
I am sure she did, I thought, taking in his handsome face, those enormous brown eyes.
When it was time to go, he asked for his coat. As I helped him stuff one arm in, then the other, he squeezed my neck and kissed my cheek.
We walked back to the truck, and he let go of my hand with an idea: Take that path, over there, and I will go this way, okay?
I nodded.
I’ll meet you at the truck, Non, he added with a grin, teasing me with this new nickname.
The dropping rays of afternoon sunshine simmered through the swaying branches, playing peekaboo; light and shadows.
He ran on his path as I kept to mine. My grandson, a little boy with roots and wings.
I am here for it all.
No more whistling in the dark.
Prefer Substack? You may follow The Palest Ink there as well.
The Palest Ink 
Beautiful…
and isn’t bitterness ugly?
Deborah
LikeLike