Hobson's Choice
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Hobson
We buried my grandmother on Saturday. Another time, I will write about all the things I remember about her. On our return, though, I've been struck by how my identity is changed by this loss.
I brought home all my grandma's jewelry from the funeral, because it was going to Goodwill otherwise. So now I'm going to be the wacky aunt and cousin who sends 1970s plastic beads and clip-on earrings to all the new children who join the extended family. They will say, "Mommy, why did Cousin Jenny send me these Christmas tree shaped earrings?" What will it be for them to know a woman mainly through the jewelry she wouldn't have chosen if she could have afforded better?
I also brought home all of grandma's half-finished crochet projects, mainly baby blankets. I think there is enough to send a baby blanket to each of my brothers and cousins when children join their lives. A really atrociously colored baby blanket, but a baby blanket (I wonder if my grandmother was developing cataracts. She _was_ 92) I've inherited yarn and supplies before, but never from anyone I knew and never works-in-progress. It is as if I am taking up my grandmother's hands in this task, as if she will not really be dead until those blankets are completed.
I am now, so far as I know, the only practicing Quaker in my immediate extended family. So much of our family identity comes out of being Quakers and farmers. Now I'm the only Quaker, and the 150-year-old family farm may die with my generation as it seems less and less likely that my male cousins will have children. I have no desire to be saddled with a farm life and less for my children to have that life, but the idea that the farm where my father and his father and his father and maybe even his father were born should leave our family, the lane where the doctor skated one cold February morning to help my father into the world, the Wildcat Creek, the place where the dairy barn used to stand, where my grandma's garden used to be be... it makes me too sad to keep on writing.
8:55 p.m. - 2005-11-02
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