Browsing Tag

grandmother

Writing

When Death Happens, Nature Welcomes You.

Since my grandmother’s death, I’ve found myself wanting to immerse myself in nature for many reasons.

First, I want to escape my daily routine — to get out of my head, which has become a very manic place— and second, because I want to be surrounded by life. To hear the conversations amongst birds and prairies dogs. To watch the deer, and the bighorn sheep, and the elk scavenge for food, mate or relish the sun. To see the leaves turn from a morbid brown to a thunderous green. To watch the Western flowers burst from beds of dirt and parched grass.

This want has brought me all over the valleys and peaks of Colorado as of late, with trips to Rocky Mountain National Park, the Flatirons of Boulder, the mesas of Golden and the red rocks of Colorado Springs.

Leading up to now, my view had mostly been of hospital walls. My grandmother — my dear, beautiful second mother — had been ailing back home in Upstate New York, and I wanted to see her as much as I could. A broken hip in August (more…)

May 7, 2018 by
Hipstercrite Life

Will you be my grandmother’s pen pal?

grandma love

This is my grandmother.

She is one of my favorite people.

I come from a very small family.

There are only four of us.

My mother, my father, my grandmother and I.

Dad left when I was seven, and my grandmother, who still lives across the street from my mother, helped raise me.

I grew up in the clothing store she owned for 35 years and spent my childhood thinking she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

She still is, but she’ll tell you she’s not.

“Beauty is for young people,” she says.

I try to tell her that her logic is faulted; I tell her that beauty can be any age, any woman, any soul.

But she won’t hear of it.

I never thought that the day would come when this determined, stubborn, busy-bee-of-woman would get old.

But she did.

And she hates it.

Aches and pains make it difficult for her to walk for long stretches of time.

She gets exhausted easily.

She spends many of her days inside her house, losing track of what day it is and missing (more…)

September 24, 2014 by
Fashion/Design, Hipstercrite Life

For the Two Women in My Life

I grew up with a single mother.

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Across the street from us, my grandmother.

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These two women helped shape who I am.

They are not perfect women, but no woman is perfect.

As they age, their imperfections amplify.

And they are aging.

I can’t stop that.

I hear it in their voices.

I see it on their faces.

The two women, the two imperfect women who made sure that I led a life different from their own, are not ageless.

They’re imperfect and they’re aging.

These were two traits unfamiliar to me as a child.

Neither woman could own either characteristic.

Both women were my world.

And they continue to be, though the dynamic has changed.

It changed sometime when I was not looking.

These two imperfect women are not indestructible.

And I can’t stop that.

If I could, I’d take all their emotional or physical ache, their moments of loneliness, their times of frustration, their seconds of confusion and seal it in a box, sending it out to sea.

I (more…)

May 8, 2014 by