Brown paper packages & Red lipstick

Driving through the Columbia Gorge always makes me want to write. Somehow I feel like I have to make a record of it, coming home. It feels different every time. All the same feelings in a body that keeps changing, further away from the child I was here. Today it is grey, even the trees are veiled in a cloud of fog that makes the scenery appear all one color. So very much the Oregon I love. Grey and serene. 

And I feel a little guilty, like this should reflect my mood. We are driving home for my Grandma's funeral. The same road we drove to her home throughout my childhood. But I do not feel grey. Perhaps I should. She is gone and I loved her. But the woman I knew has been slipping away little by little all these years. And I prefer to remember her with red lipstick, standing in her kitchen slicing red tomatoes while I stared longingly at the cookie jar. And so I will. None of the nursing homes and nightgowns and complacent smiles for her, if you please. 

When I was 12 I went away to girls camp for the first time. I was terribly homesick, a troublesome theme that would recurr at the most inopportune times in my life. She found out about this homesickness somehow. By midweek I received a package. It was wrapped in  brown paper and tied with brown string. Inside was a new white blouse.  And I cried. We had been school shopping the week before and I had wanted it desperately. But it was a summer blouse, not practical for Fall my mom said. Grandma was there and she agreed. Yet, there it was, in my package. She had gone back, just for me. The homesickness somehow seemed bearable after this. I wore it after coming home and she looked at me with a smile and told me I looked just like a little indian girl with my tanned skin and golden hair against the crisp white. Just like a brown little indian, she said. I thought it the highest of compliments.

Over 20 years later, it is still one of my cherished memories of her. And any sadness I feel at her passing is for my own benefit, not hers. She is with my Grandpa again, whole in so many ways that she could not be here. Happy. So I will choose to remember her this way. I will push the grey away and remember the goodness her life brought. And I will be happy I was a part of it.