Meemaw Part I

As the weather turns warmer, I remember my grandma, Grace Ashton Nichols. She was my father’s mom and we called her Meemaw (which is “Mommy” backwards phonetically.) She always loved the hot weather. The hottest days in July are when I remember her most, stirring sweetened iced-tea on her back porch in Baltimore. Meemaw died when I was in the fourth grade. She was 79. Both of my mother’s parents are still alive, and as a child I never understood why Meemaw was so much older looking than them. I hadn’t figured that she had given birth to my dad in her 40’s, which was rather old for a woman of her time.

Meemaw was extremely intelligent. She scored so high on every test she ever took that her educators labeled her a genius. She worked with retarded people most of her life. She was bipolar and manic-depressive, which I find fascinating that so often sick people help other sick people. After she had a heat stroke, and ended up in the hospital, my dad decided it was time that she moved to Carlisle, PA so that he could take care of her. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment a few blocks from our house and every Wednesday, my mom would pick up my younger sister and me from elementary school and drop us off at Meemaw’s. I remember chicken nuggets and biscuits. She had a small brown and yellow kitchen, and she’d heat up dinner and make iced tea in tall smooth glasses with green and yellow flowers painted on them. She used to help me with my math homework when I was in the 3rd grade. She was so patient and calm, but I would get so angry and frustrated that I would yell at her. I knew she was so much smarter than me and I always felt guilty after I’d storm out of the room, leaving the shortbread cookies half eaten that she had brought in to share with me.

She let my sister and me dress up in her old silk pajamas. My favorite one was long and peach, with a little lace at the top that showed off my bare shoulders. She even let me put on her emerald broche, along with clip-on pearl earrings and sometimes even a squirt of her perfume. Her vanity smelled like mothballs and musk, a scent I still sometimes smell, opening random trunks of her old things that still scatter my parents’ house. We would dance around in circles, practicing our ballet moves and singing into the small living room full of knick-knacks as we watched the “Lawrence Welk” show on her large TV. She let us fall asleep in her shiny maple-framed bed, as she rubbed my back with alcohol, singing in a low husky voice. I don’t remember which songs…