granma gifts

My family has been flipping their lid because my granma shipped me a package using [GASP] the USPS!  They were certain that it would never arrive, as if you can't send anything across the country without utilizing UPS or FedEx.

Of course, like every other package i've sent or received, it got here within a week.  Obviously, i've been desperately curious: what could she be sending me?!  Especially something that my mom is so concerned that i get? Clothes!!  Which might seem a bit sarcastic, because frankly, who gets excited about clothes from their granma?  Me.  I do, that's who.  Especially when they're clothes that you could not afford to buy for your new job with a 'conservative' dress code.

My granma is awesome.  She's almost seventy, & when she isn't busy raising my youngest set of cousins or keeping an immaculate house, she gardens & paints.  When i was small, & my both of my parents worked in the factory, it was our grandparents house (not that of a strange sitter) where the deep soft memories of my childhood were born.  Green shag carpeting for plastic horses to graze on, grand spirea architecture arching against the pink quartzite fence, yellow wallpaper in my mother's old room.  She taught me to paint, how to use which brushes & the importance of patient diligence.  I remember canning tomatoes, picking wildflowers, harvesting rosehips, elderberries, morels.  I will always know the names of every plant that grows in Kansas, as well as the best way to make a pie crust.  And it was that same voice singing lyrical nursery rhymes, which also cursed like a sailor.  

It was a perfect life, & i'm thankful for it all the time.