relax before the insanity begins. This fall, I will be starting my senior year of undergraduate studies and I have the full schedule to prove it.Our trips out of town usually involve visiting my grandmother in Carbondale and her wonderful garden. Unfortunately, there isn't much to do at night up there so we tend to end up spending our evenings staring at each other but the days are filled with great mountain town fun. This time we were able to take our little girl Sue to meet her great-grandmother and let's just say they hit it off quite well. It has been a long time since I have seen my grandmother smile and play like she did with Sue. She kept bringing out more toys, bones and things for Sue to play with. At some point I realized that my grandmother was treating her not like our pet but as though she were our actual daughter.
My grandparents bought their house in the late 1950s when they moved to the country and my grandmother has been working the large garden since. Her yard is different each time we visit with flowers and vegetables moved about the garden in an attempt to keep her busy in her retirement days. It has been about thirteen years since my grandfather died and about a year since her companion of several years passed on as well. She has lived such a dynamic and often tragic life and the years are beginning to show. From her I have learned the language of my cultural heritage and how to be a better person, not just by example but often what not to do.Since she is alone in a large house built over 115 years ago, we
often do some work for her when we go up. This time, we cleaned out one of the upstairs bedrooms and repainted the wallpapered walls. Let me take a moment to dispense some advice: NEVER EVER EVER wallpaper anything. It is a pain in the ass to take down, save yourself the trouble and just don't put it up in the first place. After fighting for hours getting as much of the paper off the walls as humanly possible, we primered and painted. Fingers crossed, the paint will stay on the wall.In addition to remodeling, we played some mini golf and lounged poolside at the Hot Springs so all in all, it was a good trip.
2 comments:
The garden looks amazing. Really incredible.
you know zoot, you could always see the garden. You just have to come up with us on one of our visits, you could bring the man, and even the boy or NC if you wanted, there's plenty of room. or it could just be the three of us, kind of a writers retreat.
Val
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