My Grandma stopped into work today. I’ll tell you– without false modestly– that I come from some Grade A stock. Mamie is a short walk past three quarters of a century, and she came to the plant here to pick up some retaining wall block that she’s going to haul back to her condo, set, and backfill with dirt… this is after she pulled six garbage bags of weeds out of the overgrown garden, and likely in the next few months she’ll be planting all over her new wall. I took her more than a dozen of these block last summer when she was working on this project, they’re roughly a foot by eight by four– solid– and weigh well over 20lbs each. So last summer she showed me all the dirt she’d moved to clear out room for the wall (with nothing but a shovel and a wheelbarrow, mind) and it was close to a ton and a half. Are you kidding me? I’m not sure if I’m in that good of shape now, much less if I will be in fifty years!I had a good chat with her about the house, and fessed up to the fact that once I push past the hard part of my projects, the finishing touches always get neglected in lieu of starting the next big project. She laughed and said “Well, that’s just like me… I’ve got to have four or five projects going that I rotate through, but eventually they all get done. Use to drive Jerry nuts.” I love that. That is me. Neither of my parents are like that, but here I’ve found some piece of myself that was passed down through the generations.
She gardens, does stained glass, taught me how to raise butterflies and hand-feed squirrels…
Now hopefully I also got whatever genes kept my great grandma golfing 18 holes of golf a day until past her 97th birthday.
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