Grandson

I grew up in a very backwoods kind of family (though admittedly I've seen worse). My paternal grandmother started having children at the tender age of 14. She was still a child herself! My father was the 5th (I think) and about 11 years younger than the next youngest. It never quite dawned on me, at least until I became a grandmother, how being a young mother would have turned me into such a young grandmother. I lacked the wisdom of foresight, likely a genetic trait and a lineage I would like to change ultimately, though I'm not sure how I would do that. Most of my friends waited to have children until much later in life, so now their children are around the age or even, in some cases, much younger than my grandson (he is almost five now), which makes for interesting conversations. This ultra-matriarchal status often leaves me feeling like I've somehow defied time.

Just the word grandmother conjures up images of a very elderly craggy-faced, gray-haired sweetie, baking apple pie in the kitchen and wearing thick, skin colored circulation stockings, and with awful bad breath (but still very lovable), which is how I remember my grandmother, an image of everything but what I am (except the sweetie part, of course), yet here I am, undeniably, a grandmother!

What I am confused about is why the other neighborhood children also call me grandma. How quickly little people spot irony and naturally exploit it (at my expense of course); a joke life has played on me.

The upside of all this is I'll be around long enough to see him (most precious & beloved grandson) grow into a gracious young man and possibly witness long into his adult years (another blessing life may offer me).

Maybe someday I'll write more about how this little man changed me into the neighborhood non-quintessential grandma, but for now I'm content just living the role of this munchkin's kin.

Tumbleweeds

Here I am at three o'clock in the morning, and all is quiet, and at this moment I'm reminded of how it feels to be under water, muted and surreal.

There is a L'Amour western called Conagher. Conagher the cowboy (Sam Elliott) meets lonely widow (Kathryn Ross) in a remote and desolate frontier, abounding with Indians, cowboys, tumbleweeds and purple sage. She's abandoned and isolated with two children to care for, but she makes the best of the situation. But out of her desperate loneliness she develops a compulsion for writing Haiku-like sonnets, and then carefully tying them to tumbleweeds, thus releasing her muse into the prairies. Clearly she's a resourceful woman, because what better way to self-publish in the southwest, near or around the mid or late 1800’s, but to tie your sonnets to tumbleweeds? Anyway, some of these imbued tumbleweeds happen to bump into Conagher, well actually Conagher’s horse (he’s an observant cowboy). Dazed & amazed by this weird phenomenon he ponders this poetic prose, and yearns to discover the muse behind them. But being a true cowboy the business of settling down is unknown to him. Upon realizing the need to nudge his affections, she decides to lay down a clear path, one I might note, he readily follows.

I like to think she was blogging, trying to connect, fulfilling a need to express (western style of course), maybe even searching for the cowboy of her dreams (by the way, that's not why I'm blogging). It's a simple story, as only this genre can deliver.

This venue does take some warming up to, acclimating to the whole idea of being so, transparent, but if nothing else, I hope to at least entertain and perhaps even to enlighten.

More about me at another time; suffice to say, I'm here and open to this experience.