When Grandma Died

The plants were coming back to life outside, in the Wisconsin springtime, when Grandma Johnson died. I was at college, the end of my first year, but still in the same time zone, just on the other edge of Minnesota from her.
It was Uncle Fred who found her. He was my Mom’s uncle, Grandma’s brother-in-law. He stopped by to say hello. Grandma lived alone then, since Grandpa died a few years earlier.
It was her heart. She’d been taking her nitro pills for awhile for her angina. I’d wondered if those little pills she kept in a little metal tube would explode like dynamite, since I knew nitroglycerine was an explosive. She also gave up her room upstairs, sleeping in the corner of the living room. The stairs were too much for her.
He found her in her living room chair, with the TV still on. So many times we’d sat there together, munching green grapes or some popcorn, while watching “Jeopardy” or “the Walt Disney show”. I wonder still what the last show was that she had seen.
We’d also sat there quietly reading for hours at a time, indulging our bookworm tendencies with glee.
I don’t remember the last time I saw her alive. But I remember the last time I didn’t go see her. At Easter that year I stayed on campus instead of going home for break and I would have seen her then. Looking back, there are many reasons I wish I had gone home instead and seen her.
Her funeral was at the First Lutheran Church of Falun, which I had frequented when I stayed with her those many summers , school breaks and weekends of my life. It looked just like you’d imagine a small town church would look like from the movies. I still can picture the larger than life painting of Jesus, suspended in front, behind the altar. He was standing in a blue sky heaven, clouds billowing around him. His arms were opening to the sides, as though beckoning me closer for a hug.
Grandma’s body lay in the coffin, below Jesus. I didn’t approach, although everyone else seemed to. Finally Dad cornered me. “Aren’t you going to go say goodbye to your Grandma?”
“No Dad. That’s not her, just her body. She’s not here anymore. I want to remember her alive, not dead.”
“Well, just don’t say that to anyone one else around here.”
And I do remember her, almost forty years later. She still lives in me and my reading, my playing solitaire, my caring for plants, and my eating green grapes and popcorn, watching TV.

-Terra Rafael

We Are the Cloth of Love

Before her fingers stiffened too much with age, Grandma Johnson cross stitched the gingham cloth of her aprons and table cloths. She also made rugs from rags, tied together into long strands of recycled cloth and twisted into spiral ovals to protect our feet from cold linoleum. And to breathe more beauty into life.

I still touch that cloth that she decorated, pushing needle and thread through it with her flesh and bone hands. Even imagining that cloth fills me with the spirit of her love—her love of life, her love of beauty, and her love of us.

In this way, Grandma embroidered my life, breathing more beauty into me. May my words embroider you too with love. May my words, even though they, like the cloth, will eventually decay and be forgotten, pass on the love so that you too will manifest love through your own arts and crafts and daily acts, passing on love from hand to hand and heart to heart.
--by Terra Rafael

Grandma and Her Plants- memoir

It all began when I was just a baby, crawling about on the ground. For some reason I wouldn’t venture into the grass. My mom could put me down on a blanket in the yard and I wouldn’t wander off it. Maybe it was the texture of grass—all pokey & tickly on my tender hands & knees. Or could it have been the color or smell?

As I grew I learned to love plants from my Grandma Johnson. She kept plants at her house, inside & out. The dormer window in her living room afforded them year round light. There was a fern that grew like a green fountain on top of the white, metal water heater in the kitchen. Its wispy, lanky leaves trickled down towards me, inviting me to play with them. I remember secretly, gently petting the velvet leaves of African violets. Grandma taught me as a young one not to touch the house plants, to look without disturbing them. This instilled a sense of awe.

When I was old enough to carry a child-sized watering can, I helped water the summer blossoms. Next to her back steps was a large rose bush with fragrant pink blossoms. There behind the bush, under the water spigot was a gray metal washtub. We filled it each evening with cold tap water so that the water could warm to air temperature before the next evening when we would sprinkle it lovingly on the plants.

We each would dip & fill our watering cans and I’d follow behind my big Bertha Grandma in her familiar house dress to each flower bed in turn – the purple pansies, the two large purple clematis vines growing on each side of the front porch entrance surrounded at their feet with red & white petunias, the lilies of the valley hidden in a shadier spot, and the pink snap dragons, bluebells, & cosmos flowers between the white picket fence and the driveway.

Afterwards we would sit outside a while in the white lawn chairs Grandpa had made in his wood shop & enjoy the summer evening air. (Of course I had a small chair made just my side.)

This nurturing of plants nurtured something in me that has grown through out my life, wherever I may be.