Becoming My Grandmother

Sittee peeled an orange for me. We were sitting at the kitchen table in her house. I was uncomfortable but greedy for the orange, so I sat and waited for each section. As she peeled off the peelings, I wondered how it was so easy for her and seemingly impossible for my skinny seven-year-old fingers with the inadequate fingernails. After peeling, she’d take a section and pull off the white strings and skins before handing it to me. She ate only one section herself. I wondered if we were going to share the whole orange. I needn’t have worried. She gave all the rest to me, a section at a time, as she talked.

 “When I came to this country, it was on a big plane. I had never been on a plane before and it was scary. I was a young girl and very nervous but I love it here. It’s a wonderful country.”

I want so badly to tell you more about the conversation but I honestly can’t recall if she said anything else or just got quiet.

In my mind, there was only one thought: “I want more orange and I want it all for me.” I felt guilty so I asked her at one point, “Sittee, don’t you want another piece?” She smiled a little and shook her head. I can only imagine now how sincere the question seemed to her, since I was greedily gobbling down the orange sections as quickly as she handed them to me. The situation was clear, with the clarity old women have but children do not.

~          ~          ~

Sittee is the word we used for our grandmother. She was in her seventies and had long, gray hair that she braided and wrapped around the top of her head. She fastened it with hair pins, not bobby pins. I wanted her to wear it down so that everyone could see how long it was, how it went down her whole back. Besides, no one I knew in our small Indiana town in the 1950s wore their hair like that.

Sometimes, she would let me comb her hair. The ritual was always the same: she would undo the braids herself and sit patiently while I combed and combed, no doubt scraping her scalp. I only wanted to comb it because it was so long. Long hair was pretty hair, so I liked it. Inevitably, I’d accomplish very little and she would take the big-toothed comb back and quickly tidy up her hair and braid it and pin it back into place.

The best I can figure, due to our unclear family history, is that she came to this country in the early 1900s to marry my widowed grandfather. She raised several children in a small town long before laws protected people from discrimination and before political correctness. She was not accepted by the locals.

Her life was not easy.

Her husband died in 1945, ending their marriage of almost 40 years.

The same year of his death, one of her grandsons died in his early twenties - the brother I never knew.

The third strike in 1945 was that she was diagnosed with cancer. It was not a good year.

Sittee always had boxes of chocolate-covered cherries around the house to offer guests. I’d sneak a piece, always from the second level so the first level didn’t show the empty spot. It’s amazing how children think no one can figure out their deviousness. Now I wonder if she smiled at it or got irritated.

Sittee was wonderful but I didn’t feel comfortable with her. She looked odd, smelled different than other people, and had a strong accent that I wished she didn’t.

Much later, looking back as I do too often now, I realized she was dying of cancer - though she would live for 3 more years.

Her odd look was partly because one eyelid was heavier than the other. Her scent could be different for a couple of reasons.

Our diets cause different scents. Strong seasoning will eventually make anyone’s scent different than those whose diet has other strong seasonings on a regular basis.

She was in a lot of pain and, though I don’t know what treatment was available to her in the 1950s, her medicine could have also caused a change in her vague, but noticeable, scent.

To a child, she looked odd, smelled odd, and sounded odd. She was nothing like the other people in our small town, or in my school of mostly white Americans. Since that was my world, she was different than anyone else in my world.

Sittee also made strange sounds. She would grunt or groan while she walked, like everything was an effort or caused pain. She rarely smiled. When an old person looks at a child with a serious expression, severe-looking eyes, and no apparent affection, it is not comfortable.

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Now that I am the old woman in pain and struggling to move and breathe easily, I have become my grandmother. I grunt and groan with the effort it takes to do the simplest things. I have had losses, from both life and death, and I mourn the losses. I don’t smile at my grandchildren as much as I’d like. I’m sure they see me in much the same way that I saw Sittee.

Part of the sadness in not being able to talk to someone long-gone, is that we are different now and we wish they knew it. Perhaps she knew that I would be different because she had seen how changed she was as her life progressed. We all get there, if we live long enough. You know it, but you can’t tell a child. Even that thought, that understanding, an old woman understands but a child doesn’t.

These snippets of a memory stand out because it was rare that anyone sat with me and had a personal conversation or let me comb their hair. There is something intimate in combing someone’s hair or sharing food. It felt special, an event I’d now call “one of those moments.”

Now, as the one who is old, I see her as an amazing and beautiful woman who had a difficult life. Knowing her life was coming to an end, she may have longed to know if she was leaving any kind of legacy.

There is nothing grand or earth-shaking in my memories, compared to our celebrity-focused world. Only an old woman who appreciates what her grandmother was, what she did, and hopes her own grandchildren will one day understand their own memories with that aged insight.