#4

I had a grandma. She wasn’t a grandmother or a granny or a nana or even a grandmamma. She was a grandma – my grandma – and she was very good at it.

Grandma lived in the most beautiful place in the world, a speck of a town in the sticks of southwest Arkansas where blackberries grew wild and bright orange tiger lilies lined the two miles of dirt road between the highway and her place. Grandma’s place was more than a house. It was acres of pine forest, the creek (pronounced “crick” in the native Arkansan), critters, birds, and a million opportunities for imagination and mischief, and my cousins and I took full advantage of it.

We all loved spending the summer at Grandma’s place, but my favorite part was just being with Grandma. I’d follow her around the house and watch as she made biscuits or swept the floor. Sometimes she let me help peel potatoes and now and then she’d slip me a slice of raw potato to munch on. When things were quiet and the chores were done, she would sit and crochet. I loved the things she made, so I asked her to teach me. She set me in her lap and wrapped the yarn around my fingers, and then she held my hands and moved them to make the stitches. I was the only cousin interested in crochet, and as the years passed, crochet time became our special time, just the two of us. We talked and laughed and I loved her. She was a really good grandma.

At the end of every day, Grandma would write in her journal. She noted what the weather had been like, who had come to visit, stuff like that. It was pretty boring so I never paid much attention to her journals – never gave it much thought at all.

After Grandma passed away, my mom and I came across a box full of her old journals. Apparently she kept journals since her mid-teens. I missed Grandma and wanted to be close to her so I began reading her notebooks. A lot of it was the old boring stuff, but a lot wasn’t. From those pages I learned things about my grandma I had never known. She had been shot during a convenience store robbery. She had married too young. She was afraid of birth pains. She cried every Christmas because her daughter Dixie had died Christmas day. She had been in love before she met my grandpa. She wished for a better relationship with her mother. She was heartbroken when her only friend moved out of state. She had laughed and cried. She had loved and hurt. I had never known, but just lik

e Great Billie in “The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing,” my grandma’s heart was poured out onto the pages of her journals, and through them I discovered that Grandma was more than just Grandma. She was a woman.