When I was a kid, I would wake up some Saturday mornings at my grandma’s house to those words and some pancakes. Just stating facts, here: In comparison with the food I could get at home and the chocolate chip cookies I could get at Grandma Schrock’s in South Carolina, my grandma was not great at making a lot of things, but she could make some pancakes. And vegetable soup. And Mac-n-Cheese. The Kraft kind out of the blue box with the powdery cheese substance. My mom would never make that. She was always forcing us to eat elbow macaroni with Velveeta and mushrooms. It did not even all come together in the same box.
During the last week of January in Guatemala, we had this moment when we were all lying in bed, and the lights were still on. I was already cozied up inside my sleeping bag liner, but I hooked the tie over my shoulder and hopped across the room to the switch.
“That should be your church dress.”
Oh, no, I said. I could never wear this to church. The one time I wore a sleeveless dress to church, my grandma came up and firmly patted my bare shoulders with her soft, grandma hands.
“My own granddaughter,” she shook her head.
I would drive her to church, to the store, to the doctor. She would tell me the same stories over and over and laugh so hard I could not understand them. Stories about people that I should have known. Then, she would explain who they were and their connection to our family through the names of other people that she would have to explain using the names of even more people.
We would talk about family and God and life.
We left the doctor one afternoon with instructions for food and diagrams of leg exercises.
“Is there a workout place down there where you live at your school?”
“Yes.”
“You should use it.”
After a few minutes of silence she tried to salvage the conversation with something about not having these silly problems when I got old.
That is what she did, though. She told me what she thought. She topped off my gas tank when we drove through town and gave me candy bars and off-brand root beer after I mowed the grass and told me that I should be nicer to my brother. That I need to do more for my mom because she works too hard. That I should know my dad loves me because he is always working so hard to take care of his family.
“That is how you know he really loves you.”
She told me that God did not give anyone more than they could handle, that we rely on God during trials.
And all of those things were true. Are true.
My grandma was one of the strongest people that I have ever known. Even when she wasn’t.
She lost her husband with five kids and another one on the way. She raised her children, and she gave them what she could, how she could.
I am sure there were things that she wished would have been different, experiences she wished she could get back, decisions she wished she could make again. I would walk into her house after mowing the yard and she might be sitting in the chair, crocheting and crying.
And when she showed her weakness or felt like a burden, she would tell me, “Oh, I am just your silly old grandma.”
And even in all of that, she was and is a pillar of strength in my life, a firm foundation, a continual inspiration.
She was stubborn, too. I think those things go together a lot. Stubbornness and strength.
“If I still had a ladder I could get up there and clean those gutters myself,” she said from the ground as I dropped another scoop of decaying wet leaves beside her.
And that is why she did not have a ladder. You just cannot keep some people down.
I had to pick her up for church at 8:45 to be there fifteen minutes early so that no one would see her walk up to the third pew with her cane or her walker. She would call at 8:30 to make sure that she had not been forgotten, and I would tell her that, of course, no she had not, that I was on my way, as I stood in the kitchen in my pajamas.
That is what I thought she was calling about when I saw her name on my caller ID the morning before my twentieth birthday, but I was sleeping in my dorm room in Evansville. And it was my sister on the phone.
I made an unexpected trip to the hospital that day and then more trips to the nursing home over the next ten months before she passed away.
July 7.
So here I am. July 7, five years later. In Cambodia. Month 7 here on this World Race. And a big part of me wishes that I could look forward to showing my grandma all the pictures I have taken like I did in the nursing home when I got back from Mexico, telling her about Phillipa from Xenacoj and Bonus from Bangkok and the Karen refugees in Mae Sot. Or digging trenches with pick axes in Talanga and lifting buckets of rocks out of the hole for the septic in Palacaguina or cramming in that little blue car, roadtripping to Domincal. Or riding elephants in Kanchanburi and living in that sauna-house in Bangkok and playing volleyball in the rain in Mae Sot. Because I am sure she would love all of those pictures and all of those stories.
And later she would tell them to someone else that probably did not really know exactly who I was either.
My grandma will never do those things, hear those stories, but even though she is gone now, the life that she lived and the person that she was is not. Her story was of the Depression and hard work and choices and responsibilities. Of love until her love was gone and then continuing to love because of those who needed to be loved. Of perserverence and stubbornness and probably regrets. Of needing help at times when critics were more plentiful. Of nights on knees and tears and pleas for her children and her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren, for better, for more, for futures. For hope. I see legacy.
Because of that legacy and the foundation that she was part of for her family, I have stories about Phillipa in Xenacoj and Bonus in Bangkok and riding elephants and playing volleyball in the rain.
My silly old grandma was strength and integrity and wisdom and love and compassion and determination, and it all stemmed from the knowledge of a Savior that deserved a song of gratitude and praise in spite of the trials in the morning and followers that would wake u singing.
Leona B. (Litwiller) Slaubaugh
