A Grandma’s Musings

by Donna Poole

In my favorite photo of Reece and me he has blond almost white curls, and I have dark waves. In my most recent photos of the two of us he has dark curls, and my hair is gray almost white. Almost sixty years separate us; I turned seventy-six this summer, and he turns seventeen today.

I used to hold Reece’s hand and help him walk; now I sometimes hold his arm to get up the steps into church. It seems like yesterday he was only as tall as my knees; now I come just above his shoulder.

His Grandpa John and I called him today before school to sing happy birthday to him. We told him he was never going to get too old for us to call and sing to him on his birthday and he might as well accept it because we were going to keep doing it until we died.

“We’ll probably still be calling you when you’re fifty-five,” John joked.

“I hope you will be,” Reece said, and we knew he meant it. He loves his grandparents.

Reece is the oldest of our ten grandsons, and his sister, Megan, is the oldest of our five granddaughters. Before I became a grandma, I never guessed my heart had so much room in it.

I babysat Reece often before he started school. When he was a baby, he cried if he couldn’t see what I was cooking, so I held him in one arm and stirred with the other.

He was an adorable charmer. Reece would look at me with those brown eyes, curls falling on his forehead, and ask, “You got any yogi?”

If I confessed there was no yogurt, he always said in a disappointed voice, “Oh, Grandma Julie got yogi.”

“You got chalky milk? No? Grandma Julie got chalky milk.”

I made sure to put yogurt and chocolate milk on my next grocery list and laughed when Grandma Julie told me she heard the same thing from Reece when it was her turn to baby sit.

“You got yogi? No? Grandma Donna got yogi.”

Yogurt went on her next grocery list too.

I almost always kept “I-cream” in the freezer, ice cream with sprinkles was his favorite.

Our youngest daughter came home from college and added her laughing comment to the situation. “Wait until he’s ready to graduate from high school, Mom. He’s going to say, ‘You got a car for me? No? Grandma Julie got a car.’”

Reece is still a charmer, but he grew up to be a giver, not a taker. He’d never ask me for a car; I can hardly coax a Christmas list out of him.

He was a giver even when he was a little boy. We took Reece and his sister Macy into Walmart and gave them each a dollar. Reece wanted to buy a matchbox car. Macy pulled me by my hand and hurried to the back of the store. She knew exactly what she wanted. My heart sank when she stopped in the electronic section and pointed at a tablet.

“Oh honey, those cost way more than a dollar!”

Reece looked at his dollar clutched in his hand. It took only a second for him to hold it out to me. “Here, Grandma Donna. You can have my dollar too. Then you’ll have enough money to buy Macy her tablet.”

One of my favorite memories of Reece is holding him in my arms in church when he was two and hearing him sing with the rest of us, “I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back.” He was too little then to know what he was singing, but when he got older, he did make the choice to follow Jesus, and he hasn’t turned back. He’d no more think of it than he’d turn around and run the other way during one of his cross country meets.  

I love having Reece close enough to go to some of his school functions and to see him and two of his sisters at church on Sundays, but I know it won’t last. It isn’t supposed to; we can’t keep our grandkids close anymore than we could keep our own children. But no one warned me it was going to be so hard to tell them goodbye. We watched Reece run cross country the other day, perhaps for the last time. This is his senior year.

We used to watch Reece’s sister, Megan, run, and run she did. Before we knew it, she ran right out of high school and into college. Now she’s in her last semester of physician’s assistant school two hundred miles away. She tries to come home occasionally for weekends, but her schedule is brutal. It’s a wonderful Sunday when I look up and see her sitting in the pew with the rest of her family.

We have eleven other wonderful grandchildren also growing up too fast, three just across the line in Ohio, about a half hour from us, and eight here in Michigan about forty-five minutes away.

And I know what’s going to happen to them. Like Megan, they will grow up. We won’t be going to watch them show goats or pigs or chickens or bunnies at the fair. We’ll attend our last grandparent’s day at school, our last play, our last band or choir concert, our last sporting event, our last birthday party. Someday, like Megan is now, they will be too far away for me to hug away a hurt.

This is my comfort. I think it was Amy Carmichael who said it, “Where our hands can’t reach, and our love can’t help, His hands can reach, and His love can help.”

So, I’ll hug them with my prayers, and with fifteen grandchildren, my prayer hugs may be going in many different directions.

Reece isn’t totally sure what he wants to do after he graduates in May, but that’s fine. God will show him. Perhaps he’ll settle nearby, but if not, that’s okay.

To Reece and to all my grandchildren I say, Vaya Con Dios, go with God. He’ll sweeten your joys, take the bitterness from your tears, and remind you that you have forever to enjoy the rewards but only this lifetime to win them.

So run, grandkids, run if you must. Wherever you go, make the world a better place.

And Reece, happy birthday. I hope you have ice cream with sprinkles every birthday of your life.

The end

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These blogs are now available in book form on Amazon:

Backroad Ramblings Volume One: Stories of Faith, Love, and Laughter

Backroad Ramblings Volume Two: Stories of Faith, Love, and Laughter

Backroad Ramblings Volume Three: Stories of Faith, Love, and Laughter

Backroad Ramblings Volume Four: Stories of Faith, Love, and Laughter

I have six other books on Amazon as well, four fiction books in the “Life at the Corners” series, and two children’s Christmas picture books.

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Photo Credit: Kimmee Kiefer