Almost the Oldest Woman in the World

YoungestBoy is fascinated by my grandmother. She turned 98 today. He can't wait until she turns 120 years old, because then she'll be the Oldest Woman in the World.

I put Babygirl to bed tonight and hurried to my grandma's house to wish her happy birthday. She lives only 20 minutes away, but I rarely manage to visit her. It's probably something I'll regret for the rest of my life (if she ever dies, which doesn't appear likely). But that's just how my life goes right now. She comes to my house for holidays and we speak on the phone, though. That's something. And I know she prays for me every day. That's an even bigger something.

I asked her tonight what time of day she was born, but she doesn't know. She had two older brothers and two younger brothers, but the oldest brother died as an infant from pneumonia. The youngest brother died at age 17 from injuries suffered in a car accident.

She was born at home with the assistance of her mother and her paternal grandmother. Those were the good old days, weren't they? When family and friends and neighbors assisted at births. We have the best of all worlds now--home births attended by midwives, but backed up by hospitals and doctors.

Anyway.

Here she is last year on her birthday:

She would be horrified if she could see herself. She always prided herself on her appearance. My entire life, she wore her hair up in a twisted kind of bun. But finally, the hair to her waist became more than she could handle. I still can't get used to seeing her with short, permed, old-woman hair.

Her front porch is always so inviting. A white-painted iron table always holds blooming flowers, year-round. Everything is in its place in her house. I even glimpsed into her underwear drawer once and saw that it was all neat and tidy, everything in its place. She never leaves her clothes on the floor, even now that she can hardly walk. I wonder what it was like, though, when she had five boys and a daughter at home? Did she go crazy from the noise? At least they lived in the country and she could send them all outside to play and romp and work.

She loved to garden. In my lifetime, she's raised only flowers, but when her children were young, she raised all their food in the garden and canned it and preserved it all. They were extremely poor, because my grandfather was a minister. He'd be gone for weeks at a time, while she stayed home and managed all the children and the household. She sewed everyone's clothes. Tonight my mother told a story about when she was a girl in school and she needed a new tablet. They could not afford the five cents for one. My mother cried and cried and now wonders if this explains her obsession with buying paper and pens.

My grandmother's mind remains sharp. She hears well, but has lost her vision to macular degeneration. She lives alone in the house she shared with my deceased grandfather, who died on their sixty-second wedding anniversary. She longs to join him in heaven, but we joke that she never will die--who would boss my mom around if Grandma died?

There never has been, never will be anyone as remarkable as my grandmother who made a life out of serving others and cheering them on, all while keeping her underwear drawer completely organized. I should be half the woman she is.