"Hi, Sweetie!" my gramma said to me as she came in the door. "Well, hi there!" she said to Clara, who I had been in the process of dressing. We'd been having an argument about underwear. Clara had won, and was wearing pink Cinderella Pull-ups with Minnie Mouse panties over the top.
Gramma Nina recently moved to Idaho from West Virginia. She's a self-proclaimed hillbilly who grew up in a little hollow in the mountains called, vexingly, Butt Holler. Butt Holler was named for the Butt family, who lived there first, I guess. Gramma says growing up nobody ever thought twice about the name.
Simon and I went to Gramma's hometown for a family reunion in July several years ago. The town is verdant and densely forested, and not as hot in summertime as you'd think. Patsy Cline went to high school there, just a few years ahead of Gramma Nina. Gramma says she remembers Patsy always wore cowboy boots to school.
While we were in Gramma's hometown, Simon and I caught up with my Great-Uncle Howard, one of Gramma's older brothers. Great-Uncle Howard doesn't wear his dentures because they irritate his gums, and he chews tobacco incessantly. The extra tobacco gathers in the corners of his mouth, so it always looks like he's been eating Oreo cookies. He carries a spit cup in the cup-holder in his car, a very sensible solution, unless he hasn't emptied it in several days.
In West Virginia, we also met Dump, one of my distant relatives.
"Shouldn't we call her something else?" I asked Gramma.
"Nope. That's the name she prefers," Gramma replied.
Lest you think Gramma Nina has spent all of her eighty-some years back in the holler, going to church socials and singing old bluegrass songs in a plaintive alto, you should know she has moved back and forth across the United States at least a half-dozen times. This will be her second or third time living in Idaho. She's adventuresome. She's also like a person who can't get comfortable in bed at night, and thrashes around, finding each new position better at first, and relieving in its newness.
"I love to move," I've heard her say on more than one occasion. She even went to the Philippines as a missionary for five years, where the natives thought she could do magic because she was so tall and pale, with fluffy, white hair.
Gramma Nina has never met Clara, only read about her and seen photos online.
Clara's eyes widened when my mom and Gramma Nina came through the door. She loves visitors. She stood stock-still, eyeing them with a faintly cheeky smile. Then, perceiving that the situation might call for some decorum, and that it was incumbent upon her to take charge, she puffed her chest out. Then she pointed at me and said, "My Mommy," by way of introduction, but also as a way of establishing the power dynamic.
Mom and Gramma Nina settled in at the kitchen table and I poured them Caramel Delight coffee in the china I got for my wedding. Both take their coffee with lots of cream. Gramma Nina also likes sweetened condensed milk in hers.
I passed around the box of miniature Cheryl's cookies we got in the mail the other day. Gramma Nina pawed through them and found one with buttercream frosting. Then she squinted at the nutrition information on the back.
"I'm trying to cut back," she explained. This news pained me a little. Both Gramma and my mom love sweets, and generally indulge several times a day. Or at least they did when I was growing up. Buttery Danish cookies, pans of homemade brownies, slices of three-layer red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting.
"If I let myself, I'll eat just sweets all day," Gramma Nina sighed at my kitchen table.
"Well, Mom, they got me on thyroid," my mom said, selecting a chocolatey cookie. "My metabolism hardly works."
When I was little, and Gramma was living for a spell out here, she and Mom went to a weekly weight-loss club called Tops that met behind the offices of the Glenns Ferry Gazette. The club's women all sat in folding chairs around a table, confessing their week's worth of sugary indiscretions. Or fatty, salty indiscretions, as the case may be. Whoever lost the most weight that week got to wear a red velvet cape and plastic tiara for the duration of the meeting. Afterwards, everyone marched around the table and chanted, "Tomorrow is another day! Tomorrow is another day!" a la Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind.
After I'd passed round the cookies, I wrangled Clara into a black and pink dress with a pink tulle skirt and striped leggings underneath. My mom selected a cookie for her and sat her up on her lap. Clara was intoxicated by the combination of gramma kisses and sugar. She snuggled in close to my mom's chest and grinned with chocolate-covered baby teeth. Not only was my mom super-snuggly and kissy, she had also worn a necklace with a sleigh bell at the end, and Santa Claus earrings that jiggled and danced around. Clara took another bite of cookie and I saw her little pink toes curl under with delight. I'd seen my mom's toes do the very same thing while she ate homemade ginger snaps or peach kuchen.
We chit-chatted for awhile. Gramma Nina said she'd finally found a church near her new place that sang out of the old hymnals instead of using an overhead projector. She told stories about riding a flatbed truck and singing Christmas carols back in the holler. She told a story about my twin cousins who, when they were toddlers, were selected to play Mary and Joseph in the Christmas play, and who got in a fight over the Baby Jesus in front of the entire congregation and started whacking each other over the head with it.
Mom and Gramma Nina finished their coffee and it was time for them to go. As they stood, Clara wanted to know, solicitously, if they wanted to come downstairs and play for a little while. I told her they couldn't this time, and she came and stood by the door while they said their good-byes.
After they'd gone, I put the box of cookies away and Clara wandered about the kitchen, looking for her toy bunny. Both of us feeling a little deflated, I think.
I bet Clara get's grandma's poofy white hair. It will probably come in when she goes through puberty; the body changes quite a bit in puberty.
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