She was my last living grandparent. She was also my first babysitter, and my life-long cheerleader.
When I was a baby, my mom worked in a bank. Granny took care of me every day.
When I was a kid, she lived in a big house on Boy Scout Lane in El Paso. She had three acres in the back of the house, two fenced off for horses and one was the backyard, full of trees and bordered on each side by irrigation ditches that would fill with water a few times a year and flood the yards. But when they were empty, they were an adventure land to my siblings, cousins and I. We'd spend hours out in that yard, climbing the big tree on the side of the house and running up and down those ditches, under the trees, making up stories and battling each other or imaginary bad guys, while Granny sat on the porch watching us.
She had a barn and when she was boarding horses, we'd go out and toss hay to them. We would collect eggs from the chicken coup. She even had a goose that I vaguely remember... mostly because it bit me when I was three and I still have the scar on my arm. I think that goose became dinner shortly after that ;)
Inside the house, we kids would play hide and seek through the bedrooms, hiding in closets or under the baby grand piano no one ever played in the front room and running and/or sliding down the long tile hallway in our socks with Granny yelling at us not to run in the house.
She had a bar that opened from the kitchen into the den and we'd play restaurant with her there, taking orders and filling fancy glasses with water from the bar sink. Her kitchen is also where I developed my life-long hatred of coffee, when she let me and my cousin Dave try some when I was around 6 or 7. It was too hot and gross and I am repelled by the taste of it to this day. We'd also sit at the kitchen table playing kiddie card games -- Slap Jack, Go Fish and Old Maid.
Granny and I shared a love of all things purple. I don't remember when exactly I decided purple was my favorite color, but I do know I chose it because she loved it. For at least the last 10 years, I've called the local flower shop in her town a week before Mother's Day, and three months later, a week before her August birthday and told the shop owner I needed a bouquet "with lots of purple in it." I'm sure after a year or two, that woman at Flowerland in Raton, NM, must have started thinking, "Oh, it's the purple girl calling for her grandma's flowers."
When Granny moved to an assisted living facility a few years back and was giving away a lot of her stuff, she gave me a beautiful tea pot, cups and saucers with purple flowers on them. The set is so beautiful I haven't used it for fear of damaging it.
It's weird... I was in my kitchen on Saturday rearranging stuff in my cabinets to make room for a new tiered platter set I got for Christmas. I became fixated on a top shelf that holds my other grandparents' china and Granny's purple flowered tea set. I rearranged the whole thing so that the purple teapot is showcased in the middle of the shelf.
The next day, my parents told me Granny's health had taken a turn for the worse.
I called her Monday night because I had to talk to her. Two weeks ago I was thinking I would see her this June when I traveled to my cousin's wedding. But it was made sadly clear to me Sunday that that was not going to happen.
She was really groggy and hard to understand on the phone. I told her how much I loved her. She said she loved me too. That I understood.
But I also already knew it. How could I not? No one loves you like your grandma, and my two siblings, seven cousins and I had the best grandma of the bunch.
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