The smell of cookies

I was talking to mom on facetime, co-cooking lunch with her using a sunbasket recipe, when she mentioned making chocolate chip cookies. I thought, that is an indulgence I haven't had in a long time. I didn't give it much more thought than that, until I starting smelling the cookies baking in the oven.....and then I remembered......the last time I made cookies I was at my parent's house in Illinois. We were there because Grandma T was in the hospital. She wasn't going to make it. I was at my parent's house, just Owen and I. We had been back and forth to the hospital for what seemed like dozens of trips. Sitting next to Grandma and holding her hand, singing to her, reassuring her that we were there, reading to her..... wishing that this would end for her and wishing she would not go.....

To pass the time before our next trip to see Grandma, I had decided to make some chocolate chip cookies. Owen was running around the house playing with toys. I could smell the cookies in the oven when my phone rang. It was Meghan and she said I should come to the hospital quickly. I hung up, in a panic. Before I could even process my next step.....grab Owen, find the keys, get the diaper bag.....the phone rang again. It was Lindsey. Grandma was gone.

What I think I will always remember the most about her is how I felt when I was with her. Always loved. Always cherished. Always important. I also loved her stories about her life on the farm. She could retell them with such vivid detail. She also would tell me about her life as child.....how she used to go to businesses to sell candy when she was a child so that her family could put food on the table. Her father was a jack of all trades. He even ran a laundry mat at one time to earn money. I think this might be one of the things that I am most sad about.....that all of her stories and all of her history are gone with her. Tell me again, Grandma, how that clock on the mantel was a wedding gift to your parents. Remind me, once more, the story about your footstool and how many times it has been reupholstered. I wish, now, that I would have listened more closely to each tiny detail, or written these things down. And then, after I had my own children, she would tell me how modern advancements have made parenting so much easier. How she used to take the cloth diapers out to the wash tub, scrub them clean, hang them on the line to dry outside, and then take them off the line. I would say, "I don't know how you did it! Six boys!" She would always say to me, "You just take one day at a time." 

She always took one day at a time, and lived in that day. For someone who outlived her entire immediate family and best friends, and lived through wars and the Great Depression, she never did sweat the small stuff. She took it one day at time. She lived with such grace. I'm not sure what I did in some past life to have deserved to be her granddaughter in this lifetime, but I am forever grateful.