These are my grandparents (she is beautiful like a movie star)
My family is very... closed? We don't reach out much. Reserved is the word that I mean, maybe. I think I wrote like this once before (I've written like this many times before, I guess, but more alike than usual); as I get older my fondness for my parents gets more immediate (my sense of me gets more immediate, everything about me is less mediate than it used to be, maybe) and I am more worried for them, I dread more the days when they are no longer able to be who they are now - when my dad can no longer smile with - patience? patience isn't it; it's some quality of my dad that I don't know the word for; it's the way that he explains the differences between the rail cars that pass us in the street and the way he waits for my answer when he asks for my opinion; it's the feeling of the air when he smiles after telling a clever joke (clever, so that what I notice and what I remember is that it was clever and not that it was funny (though, of course, it is that, too)). And my mother... my mother is my favorite person (truly, for once, I think).
Dad went to work today; right now he's at a school board meeting. Mom is worried, sort of, I think (though all I could think of was the tremor in her voice when she told me she needed to go to Hawaii last spring, and was she any better at letting anything out? (secretly, I think she was; secretly, I think my dad and I are the most emotionally... self-centered? (not in the sense of selfish, in the sense that ummmmmm we have very strong gravity (levity?) and our emotions very rarely reach escape velocity) of us all)). I think he will be okay.
My grandmother was beautiful like a movie star; she saved me fudge when I was little (she saved me fudge this past Christmas); she was... I don't even know. She said grace in Danish before eating, and she once told me that, when making toast, I should put on enough butter that you can't see the bread and then enough jam that you can't see the butter. She was diabetic, but she baked enough cookies to fill the porch (this is literally true). She made meringue cookies that were absolutely the best things ever (in the realm of Christmas food, anyway). She kept soda and juice on hand to feed the young 'uns and smiled with sort of bewildered pleasure when we told her about our strange modern goings-on. She knit sweaters and hats and mittens for all her grandchildren (Christmas stockings, too (mine is the white one)). She made dad start taking us to church when I was eight because she wanted to make sure that her grandchildren knew the love of God. I knew her mostly in the realm of Christmas; we only visited every other year when I was growing up and I've never made enough time to leave Northfield often since coming to school.
She was beautiful like a movie star.