I Needed...

This little piece came from a place I didn't know was there until I was sitting in Sozo's meeting room with MMWG last week. During another writer's sharing, I suddenly saw my Grandma (pronounced Gra-maw) Brickey sitting in her favorite chair, me and other grandchildren strewn around the floor at her feet. We were listening as she told stories. I jotted down a few words, and kept listening to my friends read. The next prompt was, 'I Needed...'  

I loved my Grandma Brickey so much. She was feisty and brave, tender and strong, and though there wasn't much about her life that was 'easy', she always had love and laughs for us.

Grandma, this is for you and all of us lucky enough to have you watching over us from the Heavens.

I Needed...

One of my favorite memories has me sitting at Grandma’s feet, her stories flowing over me. I needed her words, words that painted movies in my head. Uncle Miles as a teen, sliding down the mountain side, a shovel for a sled. My dad, scrawny, barefoot, dangling from a vine
like a ten year old Tarzan with a Virginian drawl. My Aunt Irene, standing in the hot kitchen, no running water, cast iron skillets upon the stove, sweating to stretch food for five into dinner for twelve. Stories of outhouses and coal towns, shanties and t.b. asylums, births and deaths. 

 

Once Grandma moved back south, her words came to me via letters. I needed the connection. Unable to speak well after her stroke, I hoarded her written words, looked forward to deciphering her scrawling script, tiny, loosely flowering lined page after page. She was my first writing mentor, blessing me with storytelling dna and a love of written remembrance. 

 

I needed Grandma longer than I had her, though she was well into her nineties when she passed. When the family gathered together to celebrate her life, there were some tears, but there were also stories. “Remember that time Mom…” one of my surviving aunts or uncles would start, and the telling of tales went from there. My cousins and I absorbed the words, smiling and sometimes rolling eyes at obvious lies. “That wasn’t me, that was…fill in the name of a sibling NOT telling the story here.” It was always the same, always slightly different, and always appreciated.

 

Grandma Brickey gave me what I needed before I knew what it meant. She is the strength that runs through me when times are too hard. She is the angel I see in my mind, her arm around my son until I arrive. She is the whistle of a single cuss word when someone gets too ridiculous at Christmas. She is, always, because of the words that keep her alive in our hearts.