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“Shoot your vagina up to the ceiling” one male doctor helpfully suggested as your head inched forward and back into my body again. Limp I stared into the bright white hospital light above me where I saw a vision of my own blood and guts floating on the ceiling. I learned later that this particular delivery room was famous for having a tinted convex light that reflected the labor in detail if you knew to look.
Read MoreI inherited three things from my paternal grandmother: my middle name, an engagement ring, and the desire to be a writer. I didn’t know that Gram’s ambitions to be a writer matched mine until I was sixteen, when I read an essay she wrote titled “Why I Am What I Am.” In it, she writes, “I have a very decided ambition to become an authoress. I have always loved to write…I have a vivid imagination, which was probably kindled by the necessity of my finding something within myself to amuse myself, for I had very few friends my age.” As the youngest person in both my extended family and my neighborhood by nearly a decade, I knew what she meant.
Read MoreRose, I saw a picture of you today. The first one, I think, I’ve ever seen. Your face was kind, like my Gran’s. For some reason this surprised me. But you must have been kind. Your daughter is kindness personified. The photo was sent by Amanda, your granddaughter, my aunt. I’d fired off an email this morning, and by lunchtime there you were, sitting in my downloads. I tried to zoom in on your face, but you pixelated on my phone screen. You were sixty-three, sitting in the garden with Great-Grandpa on Amanda’s eighth birthday. My mother, a chubby toddler, sits on Great-Grandpa’s lap. Sixty-three is the age my parents are now, but you look much older than them. Maybe it’s your clothes, your hairstyle, or the black and white camera. Maybe it’s the war, the guilt and grief that you carried away from it.
Read MoreDaytime soap operas held all the answers.
In fifth grade, my friend Connie introduced me to daytime soap operas so I could learn about things of which I had no firsthand knowledge, things that Connie already understood—love triangles, how to successfully ruin the social and business reputations of others, dead people coming back to life as their previously unknown evil twin.
Read MoreI didn’t learn to read until I was eight years old, a full month into second grade. It’s not something that entirely made sense, since I had learned how to spell simple words in the previous year, and I could speak English with the same ease as Spanish since the end of kindergarten. Reading, however, was something that had slipped past until the day my teacher took me aside, bewildered by my scattershot collection of knowledge.
Read MoreThe joke about Bath, Michigan, where my grandparents lived, was that it was fifteen miles and fifty years outside of Lansing, the capital city. A wooden sign painted “Welcome to the Community of Bath, Michigan” with the moniker of a Boy Scout Troop from the early 1970s was the first indicator that one was leaving urban civilization.
Read MoreMy grandmother’s teeth have been the lively topic of family jokes for many years. This is not cruel, but rather a kind of family shorthand, coded with her legacy of the need for levity during adversity. Even today, mention of my grandmother’s teeth prompts laughter and joy.
Read MoreFor months after my abuelita died, I slept with the covers tucked around my six-year-old face. The breeze that blew in from the Caribbean, cooling along the way as it traveled across the mountains, through the concrete city of Caracas, past the iron bars of my bedroom window, entering my mouth, my nose, my ears, felt like something my grandmother had sent from above, just for me.
Read MoreGrandma Helen was my fancy grandmother. Born in 1909, she was the firstborn child of Julius and Mary Nelson’s five children. Her tall, blue-eyed father liked to tell her that her birth brought him luck. After Grandma arrived, Julius went from selling newspapers on the Lower East Side to learning the trade in his wife’s family’s coat business.
Read MoreI am standing in front of the microwave with its door open, ready to insert the bag of popcorn I’ll have for dinner. As I reach for the bag, I hear the lush opening notes of “The Blue Danube Waltz” by Johann Strauss. My body freezes, immobilized as if zapped by some 1950s, paralyzing ray gun. Before I can turn around to see if it’s an ad on TV, my eyes puddle up.
Read MoreMy great-grandmother died before I was born. It never occurred to me as a child that she might be someone of note. But Mom knew she mattered, so a few years before I became a woman, and long before two small girls called me mother, she introduced her to me by telling a simple story.
Read MoreShe grabbed the goose by the beak, straddled it between her thighs, plucked the feathers from its neck, slit it, bled it into quietude, and continued to pluck the rest of the feathers. That night we had czernina and drumsticks.
Read MoreSummer bore down hard, distorting the asphalt along with my mood. I damned the weather as it must’ve been close to one hundred degrees. My dogs, trying to cool themselves, unfurled their pink tongues and panted. “Almost home,” I said to them. I kneeled down under the shade of a tall flowering tree to stroke their fur, and noticed a familiar looking leaf on the sidewalk.
Read MoreA few years ago, I broke the top on my flour canister. Today, I compounded the error while making bread, having split the sugar canister’s lid as well. This may seem trivial, but the containers are pewter-colored metal, large enough to hold more than regular-sized containers—the kind you can’t run to Home Goods or Belk and replace. More importantly, they belonged to my grandmother.
Read MoreI met my grandmother Angelay but I didn’t really know her. Over the years, I’ve collected stories about her, stories told by others and stories I tell myself. But I’m not sure what is true and what isn’t. Only she could answer those questions, and she’s long gone. My mother tells me that Angelay had psychic abilities. When she left home to live abroad, Angelay reassured my mother, “You’ll always know when I need you.”
Read MoreWe all lose people we love, and in my experience, there are so many things I wish I could have asked but never got the chance to. So, I dedicated an afternoon to asking my grandmother – who raised three kids, saw a good chunk of the world, was a military wife and then found herself raising me in retirement – some questions that I can cherish forever. I also took the opportunity to take some pictures of her house, a time capsule that has barely changed in my life. It turned out to be an incredibly emotional moment for me when I sat down later on and listened to her answers. I hope you enjoy this glimpse into her life.
Read MoreEvelyn Grace Swearman-Rice was my great-grandmother. Everyone in my family knew her simply as Grandma Rice. Everyone who knew her, including myself remember her as a sweet, gentle woman who loved everyone that she met. She always had something nice to say, and you never heard her swear. She’d give you her shoulder to cry on, a kiss to make you feel better and a whole mess of candy even if you weren’t supposed to eat any!
Read MoreOn October 24, 2015 my grandmother, Virginia Shoemaker, turned 90. We had a huge celebration, with her family coming home from all across the US. She was over the moon thrilled. She loved being the center of attention and even more she loved being around so many people that she hardly ever gets to see. The day of her birthday she told me that she didn’t sleep a wink the night before because she was just so excited.
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