Happy Birthday Grandma

Today my Grandma Knight turns 92 years old and lets be honest, that's a lot of years to be alive.  Here she is with the boys this past summer:

Grannie Knight and the boys.  August 2012

Here are a few things that I remember about her:

Her cozy house with carpet throughout, always very clean even down to the baseboards.  Her strong hands and well manicured nails.....I knew if I sat down next to her, I'd get a back rub/scratch and I might have to ask her to ease up a bit! Picking gooseberries and rhubarb in her yard.  Seeing her with her blue umbrella at my softball games in her stylish outfits....she always looked sharp.  Then there was Sunday Dinner once or maybe twice a month with roast beef (which I never ate because I don't and didn't like beef), homemade wheat bread with butter, coleslaw that kept true to her German heritage and had no mayo, buts lots of vinegar, salt and pepper. By the way, it wasn't until I was married and had a Cuisinart to prepare my slaw in seconds that I appreciated the fact that she chopped all that cabbage by hand and the pieces were just as uniform as mine......pretty remarkable actually.  But the best part of the meal for me was the gravy with tons of mushrooms and many times they were Morel mushrooms that she had gathered herself or my parents brought to her.  Divine!

Now, a quick bit about Morel mushrooms that sell for well beyond $20 an ounce (dried) at this point.  When I was young we would head out many a Spring to hunt for these morsels and to me it was mysterious and magical at the same time.  My parents had their secret spots to hunt and when we reached the limit of the surroundings I recognized, I knew we were getting closer.  The woods were always quiet and my parents too said very little (this was not unusual, actually, at least for Dad).  They constantly looked down, under logs, at bases of pines, aspens or oaks, and then one of them would brush away a pile of leaves to uncover these tiny tree-looking mushrooms.  I was shocked at how they could know that that particular pile of leaves which looked so completely benign and lacking any hint of treasure would reveal such a find.  On a good day we would come home with paper bags filled and on a not so good day we'd get maybe one bag which was still enough to make my mouth water.  My parents still hunt for mushrooms and last year they sent me a bottle of dried morels!   I used them sparingly and now have about a dozen small ones left, but being that I was a good mom and shared the entire jar with my children, who also love them,  I think I might have to savor these last ones alone!

"Divinely Celestial Delectable Treats"
-a phrase a friend & I made up in High School

The other memory that I have of Grandma is sitting at her round kitchen table when I was in my early 20's and reading aloud over her dad's calendar which also served as a journal of sorts.  He was brief and factual with words like:  rained, Sunday service, to town for supplies, current temps, Roland and Bernice here (his daughter and son in law), and then on the day Grandma was born nearly 12 years after her next sibling, it says:  "baby born".  My Grandma has always been a little hard to read as she tends to put on the face that she thinks you want to see and I have always struggled with that, but on this night, she let her guard down.  She walked back in her mind to that childhood home, to those people she could feel, the house she could still smell, to those memories that at this point come back to her more easily than what she had for breakfast a few hours earlier.  And for the first time in my life with her she was real to me, and I am forever grateful that I stopped by her house on that night and was able to walk away with a connection to her I never expected I would find.  

Happy Birthday Grandma, I love you!