[MaryMa was my grandmother on my dad’s side. She gave me unconditional love from the day I was born until she passed from Earth to Heaven on November 25, 2017.]
Dear MaryMa,
I miss you so much. I think about you often and wish I could call you. Lately I’ve been thinking about your hands, the feel of your hands when I would take hold of them and the smell of your hands with the Merle Norman lotion you used. I also think about your Tom’s shoes and the way you liked to look through the Tom’s catalogs. There are so many memories I have of being with you and just seeing the ordinary ways you lived and cooked and kept house and always made me feel loved and welcomed to be with you. I also think about how you loved and welcomed my children.
Lately the girls, especially Sailor, have been asking about you. They want to know where you are buried, and I have been telling them that the next time we go to Fairmont to see Gigi and Granddaddy, I will show them where your grave is. There’s a graveyard that we pass here in Greenville several days a week, and Sailor points to it sometimes and asks, “Is that where MaryMa is?” Sailor also has been wanting to talk about what it means to be buried in a box. I think she is imagining a cardboard box, but I’ve tried to tell her it’s a nice wooden box. Her little mind can’t quite understand how it’s not scary or painful for a person’s body to be buried in a box under the ground, but I keep telling her that it’s just MaryMa’s body, not the real MaryMa. “She’s in Heaven,” I say to Sailor, and I know you are, MaryMa, and I hope you love it there.
It’s a little bit nuts here on Earth lately. I don't know how much you can know about what we are doing down here, but it feels like we are living in time out of time. That is the only way I know to describe it. The Coronavirus has affected everything, it seems. Thankfully, we still get nature and I still get to go for exercise and take hot showers, but pretty much everything else feels different. Schools are closed, churches are closed, and many stores and restaurants are either closed or have limited hours and limited supplies on the shelves. My brain simply has no place to put this collective experience we are having at the moment. I keep wanting to categorize it, to say this is like that, but this isn’t like anything I have known in my life so far. Is that what Heaven felt like at first, MaryMa? I know it didn’t cause you any fear or uncertainty the way the Coronavirus has done down here, but I wonder if it felt strange when you first moved beyond time. I am thinking of you now in that timeless place where nothing changes, where everything is solid and sure and good and beautiful, and where God is, and that makes me feel happy. I’m happy you aren’t being affected by these challenging times down here, but if you were, I would also be happy I could call and check on you and just tell you about my staying home and hear about your staying home.
There are two more things I’ve been wanting to tell you. One is about a poet I’ve fallen in love with this past year. Her name is Mary Oliver, which is your maiden name! I want you to read some of Mary Oliver’s poems, or maybe you can just find her in Heaven and she can tell them to you. My favorite poem of hers right now is “Why I Wake Early,” and it’s all about the sun. I love the sun and I think Mary Oliver did too. She wrote many poems about nature, and I think that was how she experienced God. I am realizing as I write this that I don’t know if you even liked poetry. I never talked about poetry with you, not once that I remember. I wish now that I had. I would call you on the phone now and read you Mary Oliver poems or I would write you a letter and send you my favorite poems of hers in the mail.
The second thing I want to tell you about is my discovery of the writer Wendell Berry and how much I love his book Hannah Coulter. MaryMa, you are my Hannah Coulter. You will know why if you read the book. Can you read books in Heaven? I want you to know how deeply I feel connected to you when I read (and re-read) Hannah’s story. There are so many scenes of farm life, of faithfulness to place, of hard work with little to no expectation of things getting easier. Again and again, I feel humbled and grateful to have had these themes embodied for me as I was growing up and spent time with you and Granddaddy Lambert at your house, and on your farm, and on your front porch, where we would sit in the rocking chairs and watch cars pass by on the road. It feels like hardly anybody sits and talks like that now, but I can say I did….because you did, and that means more than I ever knew it would when it was happening a long time ago. Here are two quotes from Hannah Coulter to show you what sorts of things in the book remind me of you:
“...the rest of us women began to clear the table and wash the dishes and set things back to rights. For me, this was maybe the best part of all. We had the quiet then of women working together, making order again after the commotion and hurry of the meal. I have always loved the easy conversation of such times.”
“On warm evenings we would sit out on the front porch from supper until bedtime....It would be so quiet that you could hear other people talking on their front porches or a bunch of children off playing somewhere. Besides the night sounds of birds and insects, there would be just the human voices. ”
I wish I could go back and sit on the front porch with you one more time. I wish I could eat your grits and sausage, and talk to you about your magnets, and look at your stained glass, and watch you take the laundry off the clothesline. I wish I could walk into your kitchen with the green floor and see you standing by the sink in your apron that you made yourself and help you dry your dishes. I wish I could open your refrigerator and see the glass bowl of pimento cheese that you never ran out of and that I could open the cabinet and see the cans of Vienna sausage that you bought for Granddaddy. I wish I could see the newspaper on the counter beside the little basket of Snickers bars and that I could spin the Lazy Susan and hear the noise it made and take one more toothpick. I wish I could touch your hands and smell your lotion and hear your voice and tell you how much I love you.
I think you know because it’s the same amount you always told me you loved me: The whole world full.
Love,
Ginger
P.S. Happy Birthday! You would be turning 89 this Saturday. But how in the world do birthdays work in Heaven? I have never thought about that before.