librarysarie: Moosie

Growing up, I always thought of my grandparents -- my father's parents -- as being REALLY old. And, well, they were...if they were still alive, they'd be turning 99 and 104 this year. And they were much older than my other set of grandparents. So it was a surprise when I realized, about a month ago, that my grandma Moosie, the youngest of all my grandparents, was, suddenly, my oldest grandparent -- she'd outlived all of the others and was older than even my dad's father had ever been.

Moosie and me, 1978

Today would have been Moosie's 88th birthday. But she missed it by two weeks -- after declining steadily over the last six months or so, she died on January 22. She'd gone to the hospital just a week before she died -- she was having trouble breathing -- and it was pretty clear that she was at the end. She came home on Saturday afternoon and died just about 25 hours later, quietly, just like she lived. It was peaceful, in the end. My mom and my uncles, my sisters and my cousin and I were all with her.

It sounds so trite to say, but truly, there is no one quite like a grandma. It's so difficult to put into words everything that she meant to me, and I find myself simply lapsing into snippets, anecdotes, about her life and about our time together. There are so many things I will always remember: Going on walks with her. Her oatmeal cookies and her homemade chow mein. The letters she wrote me while I was away at college. The summer during college that I lived with her, when she insisted on packing my lunch every day before I left for my job as a day camp counselor (and would sometimes even send me in with a batch of cookies to share with the kids at camp). The many nights at her house playing cribbage and Scrabble -- sometimes just the two of us, sometimes a whole lot of us. How she took me out driving, when I turned 16 the winter after my dad died, because my mom was too scared to do it herself. Her delight in her great-grandchildren. How she took me shopping, the week before my wedding, to help me find a pretty barrette to put in my hair because I wasn't planning on wearing a veil.

Moosie and me, 2000.

I could go on and on. There are a million memories, and yet they aren't enough. They could never be enough. When you love someone, it doesn't matter how much time you spend with them -- you always wish it could be longer.

Moosie lived a life that sounded like something out of a storybook. She was orphaned twice as a young child, and eventually was taken in by an elderly aunt and uncle. She met my grandfather during World War II when her cousin suggested that she write to a nice young man from Louisiana that he'd come to know -- they wrote throughout the war, he came to Connecticut after he was discharged, and the rest is history. She ran our town's post office out of the back room of her house from the late 1960s until the mid 1980s.

I always loved to listen to Moosie's stories about growing up, particularly because I, too, grew up in the same town. It always seemed vaguely preposterous that we'd grown up separated only by fifty-four years, because her childhood seemed SO different from mine. She told stories about doing things like sledding down the road in front of her house. Even then it was the main road in town -- but then it was a quiet country lane, and now it's a state highway with a 50mph speed limit. She went to a one-room schoolhouse and then attended high school in an adjacent town, since our town didn't have its own high school until the 1960s.

Ian, in the one-room schoolhouse where his great-grandmother went to school (!!)

Moosie also did a ton of crafts, as did most women of her generation. She sewed a lot, and could knit and crochet (though she didn't enjoy either and I don't recall her ever doing either, although she must have at some point because a few years ago she gave me a bunch of crochet hooks and knitting needles), but mostly, at least in the years I knew her, she did rug braiding, shuttle tatting, and chair caning...three things that fall into the category of "things no one can do anymore." I'm tremendously sad to say, though, that I didn't learn any of these things from her. She tried to teach me to tat several times, but I just literally could not wrap my fingers around it (I think that now that I'm a good knitter, it would probably make more sense to me -- I must find someone to teach me!). Chair caning was something I wanted to learn -- but by the time I had the time and the inclination to learn, her eyesight had deteriorated enough that she couldn't really do it anymore. The same with rug braiding -- I don't know when exactly she gave it up, but she already had by the time I was ready to learn. Still, though, despite the fact that I didn't pick up those three particular things (though I intend to learn someday!), I learned so much from her. She taught me how to sew and mend, and the values of having a button collection and various notions handy at all times, and she always loved to try out new things -- something I definitely picked up from her! In her later years, even after she had to stop doing handwork herself, she always loved to see what I was working on and talk shop with me. For many years, she demonstrated chair caning at our town's historical fair, and I like to think that now, as I demonstrate spinning there, I'm following in her footsteps.

One thing my family is lucky to have is a LOT of pictures, going back into Moosie's childhood and even earlier. We've all been going through them over the last few weeks. I scanned a lot of them for a display at her memorial service, and have continued going through and scanning others so that we can have a digital repository and share them amongst our family members. I leave you with one of my favorite images we found -- Moosie, from sometime in the early 1940s. I love how beautiful and ethereal, somehow, she looks in it, and I love that it's not a typical posed photo. It's so like her -- always doing something with her hands.