My grandmother was a writer.  She’s been dead just over 2 years now.  I live a block away from my mom and sister, and my grandma lived on the street that intersected mine and my mom’s.  So everyone was within walking distance.  Sounds weird, I know, but it wasn’t planned that way.  My mom did choose a house close to her parents when I was a senior in high school and moved when I got home from Spring Break that year.  I was leaving for college, my sister was married, and she wanted to be able to cross the street and see her folks.  Later, when I married, this house came up for sale and my mom begged me to just look at it.  I wasn’t interested at first because it’s a story and a half, and I did not want an upstairs.  But once I walked inside, all the decorating possibilities filled my head even though the house was empty.  Good neighborhood, the guy selling it flipped homes for a living, and had his eye on buying another house; he was prime for negotiations.  The old guy took an immediate liking to me and we haggled back and forth for about 2 weeks on the selling price.  Finally, he took my offer, which was well below the appraisal value. 

It turned out to be one of those things that God apparently had in mind from go.  How would I know that my grandmother would get so sick later, and that all of us would be needed to care for her?  And how could I know that I would be taking a job in a coupla years traveling the world and would need someone close by to take care of my dogs?  And how could I know then that that person would not wind up being my husband?  I didn’t know any of it, but He did.  Geez.  You’d think I’d trust Him more than I obviously do. 

Anyhoo, my grandma:  she retired as an executive assistant to the CEO of a local gas pipeline company.  But her passion was writing.  She spent her younger years interviewing country music musicians on a freelance basis and selling her articles to different magazines.  What I didn’t know, until her funeral, was that she wrote about way more than musicians. 

At the funeral home, her articles were framed and placed all over the room. There were hundreds of them.  I’m at my grandmother’s funeral, heart broken, devastated for my mom, and yet laughing out loud at one of Grandma’s articles about cotton vs. polyester.  I dunno, the article must’ve been from the 60’s when polyester was apparently being hailed as the “new cotton”.  She called bulls**t and gave a million hilarious reasons why.  I read articles she had written about local politics; her one-liners, satirical, sarcastic, and dry humor was astounding to me.  In speaking with her, I always knew she had a knack for that hard-ass, sarcastically brutal honesty and wisdom, but reading it in her writing was something different altogether. 

In my late teens, when my life problems became more serious and much more confusing, I talked to my grandparents.  If I had a question about God, I went to my Grandpa.  If I had a question about life itself, I went to Grandma or mom.  My grandmother was a die-hard realist.  I can clearly remember her telling me, way back when, “Jenny-bug (her nickname for me), you will never able to go “around’ problems.  If you ever hope to be a person of substance with something to offer the world, you will have to go “through”.  There is no other way.”  This would be in response to me looking for the quick fix, the get-over-something-overnight phenomenon that I had heard others talk about.  You know, when something wrenches your insides so badly and all you want is to feel better and feel better now.  According to granny, you might be able to find that quick solution, but in the long term, you would be no better for having found it. 

In later years, as her health declined, she no longer felt she had the wisdom to offer.  In fact, by then, she was convinced that I was the smartest woman alive and she should be consulting me.  By then, my grandfather had long since passed, and she was bitter that he got to go first.  She was resentful that she had lost so much of her independence.  But she was still razor sharp.  Still quick-witted, still dryly sarcastic, and spouted out words of wisdom without realizing it.  When I divorced and was full of my own bitterness and hate, Granny said to me, “Oh, you deserve to be angry about the cheating.  But,  Kevin was an idiot from the beginning. That never changed. I was sorry to see you marry him.  He was such an idiot, it almost made me want to cry.  In fact, I wondered if his parents would have to tie his shoes for him on his wedding day.  But there’s no crime in being an idiot.  The real shame was that he was too big of an idiot to see your brilliance.  Brilliance that you suspended, by the way, when you chose to marry someone who couldn’t find their ass with both hands.  Sorry you’re hurt, Jenny-bug, but that’s the truth.”  Yeah, sounds harsh, but she went on to point out that there was a lesson to be learned, if only I would be humble enough to search for it.  If I would only “go through” instead of “around” by blaming the failure of the marriage solely on his infidelity.  I miss her.  And I still look in her driveway daily, as I pass her house, knowing that her car is not there. 

I know she is right about “going through” instead of cutting corners.  What I want to know is, when do you come out on the other side?