Almost five years since my grandmother died, and I still missed her. One day my sons and I drove by her old house.
“Don’t you wish Granny were here with us?” I said to Adam, 11.
“I miss her,” Adam said.
“Do I know Granny?” Zack, three, asked.
I glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “No, you weren’t born yet.” Looking at my son’s sweet face, knowing how much Granny would have loved him, made me long for her even more.
Granny was everything to me. I spent so much time at her house growing up. There was nothing better than those long talks at her kitchen table. Whatever mattered to me mattered to Granny.
That didn’t change as I got older. Granny was always up for a day out shopping-and talking. Sometimes Granny would tell me about her girlhood in Martin, Tennessee. “I can’t tell you the trouble my cousins and I would get in swinging from the rafters in our barn,” she said.
I looked at Zack again. “She was Mommy’s best friend,” I told him. “I wish you could have known her.”
I was still thinking about Granny when I headed to Bible study later. Lord, Granny was such a big part of my life, I thought. I wish she had been part of Zack’s too.
At Bible study there was an elderly woman in the front row. “This is Lilla, my grandmother,” the group leader said. “She’s visiting from Martin.”
“My grandmother was from Martin,” I said. “I wonder if you knew her. Dorothy Saddler?”
“Dorothy!” she exclaimed. “She was my cousin. We were best friends, but we lost touch when she moved away.”
She told me stories about Granny I’d never heard. I couldn’t wait for my sons to meet her—especially Zack. Now he’d get to know his great-grandmother through her two best friends.
