Goodbye, Grandma

My grandma, my dad’s mom, died last week. By all accounts she lived a good and active life — she just turned 90 and yet played dominoes like a champ when we visited her a few days before Christmas.

But I didn’t lose only a grandmother. She and grandpa, who died almost three years ago, were our closest neighbors growing up. I could see their house from my bedroom window, just across the field a short walk away. (In fact, we would walk across the field to visit when crops weren’t planted.) We visited at least once a week, usually to play cards. I can’t even count the number of card games they taught us, mostly brought back from their winter stays in Arizona.

We’d often take long walks along our rural road and regularly go on vacation with them. (Grandma is the one who taught me the license plate game — listing each state on a piece of paper and checking them off as we found them on the highway or in parking lots throughout vacation.) And as my sister and I grew up, we could count on Grandma knowing when we would leave and arrive back home — she had a perfect view of our driveway from the window above her kitchen sink!

I left Defiance for college more than 20 years ago, but still visited them on my visits back. I’ll always be glad that Grandma got to play dominoes with Edith at Christmastime and taught us a new dice game. I can’t hardly wait to teach both kids how to play 7-Up! My kids won’t have too many memories of my grandparents, but their legacy will continue.