Not just Grandma...Grandma Great

I suppose I have avoided it long enough, a post about my Grandma & Grandpa K.  It's not that I don't want to share about them....I'm almost afraid to talk about them, my Grandma is still living.  She turned 93 years old in June.  I'll probably just tell a little about her for right now.  I have lots I can share about them both though.   My Grandma K is now known as Grandma Great.  She informed all of us pretty quick that when my daughter was born, the first great grandchild, she would be referred to as such.  Allrighty then.  Now, I can't imagine calling her anything else...and that was eleven years ago.

I was fortunate enough that these grandparents lived only about six miles from us and were healthy, active and supportive of the whole family.  I have no idea what my grandparents were like as parents, but they did a pretty good job at the grandparenting thing.  First of all, Grandma Great can cook.  She can bake, make candy, has the best homemade noodles and can fix just about anything to make it taste right.  She can sew too.  She was a homemaker.  But for a few years of working in the grocery store downtown as a teenager, she has spent her entire life as a wife/mother/grandmother/great grandmother and homemaker.

Until 2009, she was still mowing her yard some, sweeping out her garage, working in her garden, messing with flowers, grocery shopping, running people to and from fields in her truck.  Oh, yeah, she drove a truck.  No car for this gal.  She wants to sit up high.  It cracked me up to see her barreling down the road in that truck, eyes fixed to the road before her, hands positioned perfectly at 10 and 2.  She would not wave or turn her head.  She was focused.  And if you happened to be in front of her, her focus became getting ahead of you and she would do just that.  She hated for anyone to be in front of her...so she put the pedal to the metal and passed.  It was hilarious.

January of 2009, my dad arrived home from a hip replacement surgery.  Grandma Great drove her truck over to my parent's, parked, sashayed (her words) inside the house, tripped on my mom's area rug and shattered and fractured her femur.  She was 90 1/2 yrs old.  Ugh.  Here we go.  She recovered, was doing real well.  Then came January of 2010.  My dad had taken her to get groceries, dropped her off at her house and left.  She went to her bedroom to get her sweater and fell.  Simple as that...broke her hip.  Devastating is what that was.  She had just rehabilitated from the leg.  Here we go again.

She recovered again.  Amazing, this time she was 91 1/2 yr old.  Doctors were shocked that she had done it again...she was walking.  She was doing pretty good considering everything when long about the end of January of this year (what is it with her and January?), things went south.  She developed a strange condition in her esophagus and stomach and required an immediate and life-saving surgery.  Here we go yet again.  It pretty much wiped her out for a couple weeks.  At one point, I felt as though I had said my goodbye and I would not see her alive again.  That was not to be.  She didn't bounce back quite as well as she had before, but is doing pretty good for now being 93 years old and having had a pretty rough couple of years.  We moved her to a nursing home and she is content.  Maybe not where she wants to be, but she is content...and "tries not to complain" which she doesn't a whole lot anyway.

Fortunately for me, she's in a nursing home in the town I work in.  It is very handy.  I visit her often, a lot actually.  I never feel burdened by it or dread going.  I don't mind getting the things on her lists, doing her laundry, cleaning her glasses, plucking her eyebrows or washing out her hair brushes.  I hope I never do dread it.  I love this lady with all my heart.  I know she won't live forever, but she's been doing a pretty good job so far.  I can't wait to tell some stories on her.  She's quite a corker.