the notebook…yes, that one.

We’re making plans to visit my grandparents. Sooner rather than later.

Until last year I traveled to the States twice a year, each Spring and Summer, to spend a month with them at their home in Iaeger, West Virginia. Racked up air miles like nobody’s business and went to bed feeling not-so-bad that I missed out on a holiday in the Maldives.

Over the past 12 months I’ve visited more frequently. But it’s always been in dribs and drabs. A weekend here. A few days there. Never that solid month where we could get down to business peeling potatoes and painting porches. I promised Pa over Christmas that I’d be back in February to spend good quality time. Hopefully a whole week.

I told him I’d arrange all of their hospital visits so that I could attend and I’d bring him more of that fancy English chocolate he likes so well. He said to be sure to bring The Euro too because that Euro makes the best coffee I ever had. My grandmother agreed and added he cooks better than a woman!

My grandmother has dementia and Pa is her only carer. Things like freshly brewed coffee and roast dinners are meaningful to them; and since neither enjoy the physicians’ visits that a chronic illness requires, both appreciate the time I spend flirting with, and getting to know, her 72 year old doctor.

Growing up I got most of what was meaningful to me from my grandmother. Pa was a bit of a superhero to be applauded and adored. But it was my grandmother who was always present…teaching me things like how to sit like a lady and how to be me no matter what. Even though Pa remains, hands down, the best story teller I’ve ever met, it was my grandmother who loved words. Who spent years of her life putting them down on paper.

She published four books of poetry in her more youthful years and last summer she took me into a spare bedroom and introduced me to a dozen or so voluminous notebooks made up of short stories and poems and bits of her memoir. She had organised them by the decades of her life. She handed me a dull blue one and said “I don’t remember these, but it says I wrote them in my thirties. That’s how old you are, right?”

I haven’t read the notebook yet. Because I break out bawling every time I touch the spine. Then I think about that novel by Nicholas Sparks. The movie with my favourite little fellow, Gosling. How I never understood the appeal that warranted a million dollar advance. Until my grandma began to forget. Then it all made sense.