Grandma Frances

I woke her up one night when I was about 7 years old. Shaking her shoulder and saying Grandma, "wake up there is a dragon in our bed!" As it turned out there was no dragon in bed just my grandma snoring. Every time she and Papa came to visit I got to sleep with her on the fold out couch. I remember her wrapping her arms around me and feeling her soft silk wrinkles all around me. This tight hold was mostly about showing me how loved I was, but it was also about keeping my bony knees and elbows from bumping her during the night. I still am all knees and elbows and now Kyle suffers from the same misfortune. Sleeping in the bed with her is more or less where my memories of her begin but from the photographs and stories I know our friendship started well before the dragon in the bed night. She had lived a whole full life before I came along. I will leave it to someone else to write down those memories. I will tell you some of what I knew about her.
She was of the earth and knew encyclopedias full of knowledge about gardening and farming.
She loved her family and she hated to say goodbye. When we would have the car all packed up to drive home she would say just get out of here and shoo us off. She often would not make it outside to see us off. I would cry in the car as we drove away imagining what it would be like to say goodbye to her forever. I was blessed because that time did not come until 20 or more years later, but it has been just as deeply painful as I imagined it would be. She passed away peacefully in her chair with the newspaper in her lap and her blanket pulled up around her shoulders. She never had to say to goodbye to us and for that I am thankful.
I went to stay with them in the summer and take swimming lessons at the Malin pool. She would drive me there every morning and watch in the stands as I learned to swim. I remember picking raspberries in the little berry patch behind their house that summer. I don't think I will ever taste a raspberry without thinking of her.
My grandfather and she bickered relentlessly and I remember making everyone say, "I appreciate you grandma" that summer to try to smooth things out a little bit. She was forever sending my grandpa on errands out to the shed to get this or that.
She was all in all a good cook and kept us all fed one of my very favorite dishes was a cabbage and carrot soup she made with black peppercorns in it. You never knew when you were going to crunch down on one and light your mouth up with spice. It was warm and comforting like she was but also had a mean kick if  you bit it wrong. Grandma had a short fuse. But we forgive her that because she was just so darn much fun. She was always looking for an opportunity to laugh her high pitched exhaled laugh and she found plenty of them. She would tell stories and almost not be able to get through them because she would be laughing so much.
She played cards. . .  any card game. She loved it and she was sharp too. I played a lot of skip bo with her.
She loved Christmas. This was confirmed to me when she moved to "The Home" in Klamath Falls. She only had 3 small storage cupboards and she had all 3 of them full of Christmas decorations. The door around her room as well as half the hallway was decorated in her Christmas cheer.
She was a social butterfly. Any social event I attended with her she would stop and say hello to everyone at the party she never met a stranger.
She had a whirlpool tub that she would fill with bubbles for me to soak in. As a child immersing yourself in a giant tub of bubbles was about the most fun that could be had.  I would be completely covered in two feet of bubbles with my head sticking out like a cherry on top of a fresh batch of whipped cream.
She loved Kyle and welcomed him into the family with an open heart. She would ask him about some of her medical conditions and tease him about how he was forever doing her dishes for her. She loved to make him her rhubarb crisp (it really is the best dessert ever and to bestow it on Kyle really meant something).

Our son Jonah and his Great Grandma Frances have something special. From the minute they met he loved to be held by her and sung to. She would put him down and watch him kick and play with his toys. I know this sounds like what anyone would do with a baby, but I am telling you there was something more to it. Something that matched their souls up. I can't describe it, but it was just something that they knew, a secret language they spoke together. I am devastated that they will not see each other again here, but I am confident that when Jonah gets to whatever comes next Frances' spirit will be there too.
She was forever inventing things or finding new uses for old things. You just never knew what purpose she had found for a  Cool Whip container.
In so many ways I feel like with her passing all this is all gone. There is so much emptiness in my heart and I know I will miss her for the rest of my life probably every day
God Speed Grandma
I have selected two poems for you.

i love you much(most beautiful darling)

by e.e. cummings

i love you much(most beautiful darling)  more than anyone on the earth and i like you better than everything in the sky  -sunlight and singing welcome your coming although winter may be everywhere with such a silence and such a darkness noone can quite begin to guess (except my life)the true time of year- and if what calls itself a world should have the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such sunlight as will leap higher than high through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each nearness)everyone certainly would(my most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love Stealing Lilacs by Alice N. Persons A guaranteed miracle, it happens for two weeks each May, this bounty of riches where McMansion, trailer, the humblest driveway burst with color—pale lavender, purple, darker plum— and glorious scent. This morning a battered station wagon drew up on my street and a very fat woman got out and starting tearing branches from my neighbor's tall old lilac— grabbing, snapping stems, heaving armloads of purple sprays into her beater. A tangle of kids' arms and legs writhed in the car. I almost opened the screen door to say something, but couldn't begrudge her theft, or the impulse to steal such beauty. Just this once, there is enough for everyone.