laura hough smith

My dad’s mother — Mimi, we called her — was one-of-a-kind, as I suppose everyone’s grandmother is.
She was a lady. She used phrases like “two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” and when anyone walked in her back door, before she saw who was there, she said, “Yoohoo.”
She had a sweet, high-pitched voice, and she was my best friend. I was the first-born grandchild, and for 10 years, the only grandchild that lived in Missouri.
By the end of sophomore year of college, I was thinking about a career in journalism, so that summer I signed on for an internship at the Standard-Democrat, our local paper.
It was this summer we grew close. We went to lunch after church — sometimes just the two of us. And, we lunched together during the week. We shared a love of reading, and she bought me books on occasion — books I always loved.
The bond we developed that summer deepened, and a summer or so later, I found myself across from her at another lunch table, telling me I could choose my college graduation gift. My choices were a trip with her, in which I was allowed to pick the place, or I could have the cash equivalent of the cost of the trip. I chose the trip on the spot — and our destination: New York, N.Y. We had months to plan the trip, she said. Think about it.
I’m pretty sure she was considering places like Charleston, S.C. and Savannah, Ga. — lovely, Southern places she’d vacationed with her friends. But some nine months later, we were in Memphis boarding a plane to New York.
I wouldn’t trade the memories of that trip for all the tea in China, as she would say. We went to Broadway shows, we shopped on Fifth Avenue and I drug her down to Soho in the worst blizzard New York had seen in March in years. For a worldly, well-traveled woman in her 70s and her 20-something granddaughter, it was the trip of a lifetime.
Four years later, the woman who’d literally traveled the world was forced homebound, so we continued writing letters as we’d done when I was in college.
She wanted books. Too weak, too sick and too depressed to go to the bookstore or library, Wesley and I would comb Memphis book stores for books she wanted or ones we thought she’d like.
She and my mom were both growing sicker and died within four months of one another. I was devastated to lose her — sure I’d never recover — but sadly, the loss of my mother, sadly, eclipses how much I miss my Mimi.
When it occasionally hits me that they’re both gone — that the rug was pulled out from underneath me — I remember why I’m still struggling to adjust to this new life without them. But I also stop to remember what our minister, Mary, said in Mimi’s eulogy.
She said she’d seen Mimi for years in the congregation. She saw her lunch at the country club, saw her at her own mother-in-law’s house for bridge, saw her in her fur coat at Christmas, saw her with her family all those Sundays. And after years of seeing that she’d assumed some things about Mimi’s life and even wondered why Mimi would attend church so faithfully.
And then she opened the family bible, it showed that Mimi practically raised her younger brother, when her mother was too ill to do so. It recorded the divorce of Mimi’s parents when couples didn’t divorce. It showed that her first child was born with severe disabilities, and that in her third pregnancy one of the twins died. It recorded the death of her mother at a young age. It showed that at 55 she lost her husband of 32 years, and three months later, she buried their eldest child. But Mimi was a woman who endured, a woman who knew suffering and then thrived.
She told me on our trip that she’d once had the chance to remarry after the death of my papa, Rock. She said she would remarry this fellow, as she called men, or she’d never again. She declined the proposal and made friends with Sikeston’s other widows. They set about traveling.
Once a year the ladies took a trip, and the stories they came back with left us and them in hysterics. Later in life, she made the arrangements for annual trips with her lady friends from her high school graduating class, and these left her so fulfilled, so proud. But years later, on our weekly telephone chats when she was sick, she’d inevitably mention our trip.
That was something, she’d say. And it was.

© Laura Hough Smith and laurahoughsmith, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Laura Hough Smith and laurahoughsmith with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.