I have very few memories of my grandmother, but I remember her as calm and small. Her back teeth were silvery, and she always wore a skirt and little heels if she left the house because she thought it was most comfortable that way. She loved to watch spelling bees on TV, and when we came to her house she always served sweet tea (which was off limits at our house.)

I remember a lot about her house, like that her bathroom was pink and white and smelled like Listerine. Her house and lawn was always immaculately tidy, and I can’t think of anything that changed about it for as long as I knew it. There was one little closet off of her kitchen for toys for the grandchildren, but it had some quiet games like checkers and a small square white plastic box with crayons, and maybe a ball. Her bedroom dresser had on it a small statuette of the virgin standing on a diamond that encased red roses, a picture of her with my grandfather (who I never knew), and an old picture of all my aunts and uncles and my mother looking so beautiful. There was also a fancy hand held mirror with a white handle, and a picture of Pope John Paul II stuck to the side of her mirror.

I loved to sit in the big chair next to the bookshelf by her door and flip through the books. My favorite was the one on Princess Grace of Monaco and I’d look through the pictures while listening to the big sea shell that sounded like the ocean. Sometimes I’d trudge outside to look over her snowball bushes or look out over the alfalfa field to the tiny white house in the distance that my mom pointed to and said that she was born in.

Really though, since I came after grandpa Martin passed, I had two grandmothers. Grandma Martin and my Aunt Mildred. Aunt Mildred always seemed really happy to see us, and she always remembered to treat us to the candy stash that they kept in the cabinet just left of the sink, (I remember Wrigley’s spearmint gum and bright orange soft circus peanuts), or bottled pop in the garage, or pull out some nice pastry from the white deep freezer by the back door. Aunt Mildred kept us in line if we got too rambunctious in the basement, or if she sensed us snooping around in the storage space behind the long curtain partition. (Some cousins found this space intriguing, but it scared me to even get close to it!) I think that I saw Aunt Mildred’s bedroom only twice because she kept the door closed. Inside, I remember a huge fan, a lot of plants, and a little statue of a black man in a long robe, which may have been the first depiction of a black man I'd ever seen. When I asked about him, someone told me it was Saint Martin, and I concluded that my mom’s side of the family had some very dark skinned people.