grandmothers

Dear Abby has had her day, now it's my turn!

And I can't die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, I'm a cracked plate.

Once your words fly out of your mouth, you sometimes can't control whether they fly straight or crooked, Grandma Augustine says. "They can get bent in the strangest ways." Grandma Augustine says that the only way to straighten out bad words is to keep making good ones until you say what you need to say to who you need to say it to.

if god had intended us to follow recipes, He wouldn't have given us grandmothers.

My grandmother, a dim, stern figure, named her children Lily and Violet, which I guess from seeing a picture of my mother's paved, ugly backyard, was the nearest she came to a garden.

I want to go swimming," the child said. She waited for opposition, but none came. So she took off her clothes, slowly and nervously. She glanced at her grandmother -- you can't depend on people who just let things happen. She put her legs in the water."It's cold," she said."Of course it's cold," the old woman said, her thoughts somewhere else. "What did you expect?

The only reason that some people aren__ ashamed of their parents and/or siblings is because they know that we know that they did not choose them.

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is.

I still loved Granny. It flowed out of my chest. With Granny gone, where would my love go?

When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.And so, laughing and crying, we said good-bye to my grandmother. And when we said goodbye to one grandmother, we said good-bye to all of them.Each funeral was a funeral for all of us.We lived and died together.All of us laughed when they lowered my grandmother into the ground.And all of us laughed when they covered her with dirt.And all of us laughed as we walked and drove and rode our way back to our lonely, lonely houses.

What she showed me was, Yes, I am Grandmother as she is; there is no separation, really, between us. And that, on this planet, Grandmother Earth, there is no higher authority. That our inseparability is why the planet will be steered to safety by Grandmother/Grandmothers or it will not be steered to safety at all.

I know nothing about her. Just some books, and some stories she tried to tell me, and things I didn't understand, and I remember big red soft hands and that smell. I never knew who she really was. I mean, she must have been nine too, once.

I thought grandmothers had to like you. It__ a law or something.

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.

Granny always said finding justice was as tough as putting socks on a rooster.

Saying you're through with romance is like saying you're done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.

I was lucky to live in the 20th century, when gefilte fish could be purchased in a jar.