Crafts or Lovemaking: A Quandary (“Country” 16)

My grandmother, age 80.

My grandmother Lena came to visit me when I lived in a Vermont log cabin with R and the two children. A secular Jew rooted in Germany, she’d exited her homeland around 1938 for safety in England. In a large house in Woking, outside London, throughout World War II she managed the flow of family and refugees, including accessing food through everyone’s ration cards, and keeping her own chickens for eggs. I can never cook scrambled eggs without recalling how she’d scrape every precious yellow fleck out of the pan when I was a kid.

She was nearly 80 when she visited us at the log cabin. I collected her from the airport in my aging VW, which had very poor or no heat, so I brought with me several blankets, and tucked them around my slender grandmother in the car; she beamed and said “Just like the old days!”

While staying at the cabin, she took a daily walk, with her cane. Bear in mind, this was February, and the snow was more than a foot deep, the temperatures often below zero. But she’d head out on her own (my companionship declined), down the snowy road, and back again.

At Dad’s city home — Dad, plus my grandmother and me, and the kids. I made that dress. Sigh.

The first afternoon, after her walk, she settled in a chair and asked, “So…