Luky;
My husband and I celebrated many anniversaries together, and I feel that the most significant feature about our marriage was the fact that we were still together and content to remain so.
This may be because although my husband was once an extremely casual Irishman and I very precise Dutch girl, he adopted my attitude that "if a job is worthy doing, it is worthy doing well, and if there is work to be done, there is no time like the present"; whereas I, yawning luxuriously, learned to stretch my legs closer to the fire and plead:
"Put on another log and stop fussing. What's your hurry?
Sure, when the Lord made time he made plenty of it."
Thinking that made me remember my grandmother and the letter she sent us two weeks before our wedding.
My grandfather having passed away a few weeks previously, she was writing in reply to my letter of condolence and including her congratulations to us.
She was not given to dispensing advice, which is why we were all very fond of her, but on this occasion she got her point across to us by writing:
"If you could have known two people as different from one another as father and I were, you might ask:
'How did two people, so totally different, ever stick it out together for 53 years?'
But we did, and we loved it, and I only wish we could add another 53 years to it."
Story book granny
My grandmother was the sort of granny depicted in story books.
At the age of 46 she went into black clothes, and nothing her fashion-conscious daughters said could induce her to go back to coloured garb.
She wore glasses, and her hair - which she had never cut in her life - was neatly put up in a bun.
She seldom spoke unless she had something to say, but then she got more into one sentence than other people could put into ten.
Valley of tears
Like the time when I asked her:
"Why do people call the world a valley of tears, when it is so lovely?"
She replied, not theatrically, but in a very matter of fact way:
"You'll find that out when you're big."
And when I did, some twenty years later, I suddenly thought:
"So that's what Ouma meant that time", and a wave of comfort engulfed me.
Eleven children
Having had 15 pregnancies in 20 years, my gran had been of a nervous temperament, but by the time she had brought up her 11 surviving children she had learned to relax and when I knew her she was a stoical, reserved woman, deeply but undemonstratively religious and extremely generous, hardworking and self-effacing.
As her children left home one by one to get married, she refused to reduce her milk order because the milkman still had eight children under 15, and she did not want them going short.
So we all remember my grandmother's plaintive request:
"Are you quite sure you wouldn't like a nice, health-giving glass of milk?"
For the last 14 years of her life she suffered from diabetes and had to remain on a strict diet.
Characteristically, she never complained, although she prepared all sorts of delicacies for her family when they came to see her.
She died without much fuss, and outwardly one could hardly notice the difference, or so those living near her said.
But when I went back to them for a visit some years later, I felt an almost tangible gap, and though a lovely blooming plant had been taken out gently, roots and all, and transplanted into a more beautiful garden far away.
*Luky and both sets of grandparents on her First Holy Communion Day
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