Echoes.

When I was little, I spent a good majority of my time with my grandmother.
Granny, as we called her, was a woman full of spit and fire – she could nag the ears off corn, but she had a heart of gold.
My dad would go work with my grandfather out in the hay field – bailing hay was always good for some extra funding, and in the dual worlds of carpentry and mechanics that my dad occupied, extra money was important.

I was endlessly fascinated with my grandparents. 
They could make toys and fun out of the simplest of things.
Hours I spent doing puzzles and playing the modern game of Yahtzee with my Granny…
And hours I spent playing with string and simple things that she knew how to put together from her childhood.

The button toy, for instance.  I think it’s technically called the buzzsaw, but between that and the whimmydiddle, I have chosen the alternate names of button toy and the stick toy. 
Toys that have been around for as long as she could remember… a simple button and a string.

She had a bowl of buttons – heavens I wish I knew where they were now. 
I have a feeling that somewhere along  the way I inherited a lot of them, but I wasn’t smart enough to know then how cherished those little ancient buttons would be now if I were to see them.
But some of them were buttons she’d gathered along the way – she was an embroider… she loved to sew.
And some of them were from family members… some her mother’s…
I remember being taken with the buttons shaped like delicate flowers… or being a young girl, the buttons with ‘sparkles’ on them – gemstones placed here and there.

She would tell me about them – where they came from.
She had an amazing memory and could list the history of almost every button in the collection.

I miss that. 
Sometimes it’s the simplest of things that you remember and long for.
And I miss her and her buttons today.  Very much.

I woke up one night about a week ago in a sweat.
While that itself isn’t unusual, as I tend to have more sleeping problems than most, the fact that I woke up because of a cup was a little strange.

We lost my grandmother a little over a month ago. 90 years old, full of spit, the family matriarch who ruled our lives without ever suggesting such a preposterous notion. She just did it. We knew it, she knew it.
And, boy, do I miss that.

She lived next door, which means that every night I drive home, the empty driveway from next door just mocks a sting that hasn’t even begun to lessen.
The dividing of possessions has started and I could care less about them for the most part. What is junk to the rest are the real treasures to me, but then again, Gran and I were always like that.

There are the old glass shave gel bottles that Avon put out in limited edition shapes – a riverboat, a train. Gran kept the ones she received and considered them part of her treasures. Until she died, they remained in her china cabinet along with random other delicates.
I’m not really sure her kids really know how much those things meant to her, but I did, and things like that are the very reason this loss hurts so badly.

But I woke up the other night convinced that I needed to get up RIGHT THEN and go get the last cup.
You see, Granny had this set of bowl/cups – an object that is the mixture of the two – about the size of a large cappuccino mug, and the grandkids would all fight to be the ones using these special dishes.
She’s make cornbread and milk for us and we’d sit around chowing down as she finished cooking supper in the kitchen.

There is only one of these cups left, and after weeks of being prompted to mention what I want out of the lot, that rose to the top of the previous nonexistent list. I’d love to have those shave gel bottles, the old pictures and articles she kept that the kids cared nothing about, the military flag from my grandfather’s funeral and various odds and ends, but what I wanted more than anything in the world, was the ugly little cup with the men on it.

The cornbread and milk cup.