It’s late and I’m writing. I wish I knew why I can’t seem to write during the day while the kids are at school and my husband is at work. No, the words can’t start flowing until after 10pm. When I’m teetering on the edge of sleep happiness.
I feel as though I’m preparing for the inevitable development of seasonal depression that seems to hit around winter. Everything has been going well. I’ve been writing (even though it’s late and it’s throwing off my sleep schedule), and working on a few things here and there to stay active.
I’ve also been putting the plans together to start remodeling the house and then documenting the changes (how I did it/before and after etc.) on the blog. You know the things I’ve been talking about doing for a few years.
So why do I feel like I might soon be “down in it”?
Because that’s how anxiety/depression/being crazy works.
Sometimes when I get this way I remember my grandmother. My mothers mother.
Grandma Sue.
She struggled with depression her entire life, like me. We talked about it some when I was older and was living with her for a little while, during college.
I’m starting to notice that the things I do when I’m feeling down are things that she did. The darkened rooms, sleeping late, avoiding everyone, nervous ticks, and obsessive cleaning.
I remember her good days too.
I remember those more than I do the bad, because her good days were so contagiously good.
Grandma Sue was a character. Ask anyone who knew her. She was pretty, and daring. Really funny. Not in that “oh my grandma’s a real hoot” kinda way but truly side splitting, unflinchingly funny.
She said things that men thought they were only allowed to say. She was southern but not delicate at all. Even in the old pictures, before she was a wife or a mother. When she was just (Don’t call me Mary!) Sue.
Of course even then she was also a daughter and a sister. That’s the way of it when you’re born female, and the oldest. You’re born with a job and responsibility . At least that’s the way the world worked for the oldest daughters in my family.
Sue took care of her 3 younger sisters while her mother and father worked the farm almost entirely alone. One might say that she ran away to get married because she was so desperate to escape her situation. Those people never saw the pictures of my grandad. The two of them together look like the beginning of a really good romance movie. She was all of 100 pounds, 10 of it hair, and the thing that you can see right off the bat is that she knows she’s beautiful.
It makes her even more beautiful. She dares the camera to make her look bad.
The fact that in many of these pictures the person on the other side is my grandad and the love of her life, doesn’t hurt at all. There aren’t many things in the world more beautiful than a confident, happy woman in love.
In later pictures she is tired. Sometimes she is happy and you can still see a little of that glow but there’s always something missing. I notice it a lot in the pictures of the women in my family.
My grandma was still a beautiful woman. She lived a life full of struggles and heartbreak. She spent years worried about her weight and how she wished she looked the way she did when she was 18 and in love.She tried hard to find the right medications and the right way to live her life and be happy. I wonder if she had any idea that she was like a sun we all orbited around, and that when she died we all collapsed into the black hole sized emptiness she left behind.
She could make anything grow and she was like a magnet for animals. Feeding stray cats who seemed to run out into the neighborhood to tell all the other stray cats that this lady was cool. At times she would be feeding twenty or thirty stray cats only calling the shelter or asking for help when she couldn’t afford to feed them.
She cleaned houses for a living. I went with her once, on the way to meet her with my mom for some reason or another. The homes were usually upper middle class homes. Nothing too large or gaudy. The insides were always nice, like something from a magazine, but I remember that they always felt cold. There were always extra rooms where the furniture was obviously unused like some antique store and not a real home.
Seeing the nice houses seemed to make my grandma try so much harder to make her home appear nicer. She’d save for months and wait for special china collections to go on sale. Then she’d order a whole matching set of pretty plates and cups that she used to decorate her kitchen table. We weren’t allowed to use those dishes until she’d saved to buy a new set and then the old set would go into the cupboard or if they were particularly nice, into a box and gently placed in the attic. To me though, her decorating skills were better, and much more homey, than the women who paid her to clean the things they were too busy to.
This is why I’m thinking of her at midnight on a Saturday night. I’m going through the paint colors for the laundry room and the kitchen, the first two rooms on my list of home makeovers. I’ve decided to redo the house in ways that are as up-cycled as possible. Affordably eco-friendly.
It was rare that my grandmother bought something new. Not because she didn’t want to but because she couldn’t afford it. She thrifted yard sales and consignment shops, sometimes driving past Paris Tennessee to find the right deal. She was picky and knew what she wanted and how to make a good deal of it. Everything she had had a purpose and a value to her. That is what I remember most about her decorating and hope to recreate in my own home.
I don’t want cold rooms with things I never touch to sit and collect dust. I want things that are meant to be used and admired and well loved. It doesn’t matter if it’s something that someone else doesn’t want or if it’s a little broken.
That’s the bulk lesson of everything my grandmother taught me, how to love the broken and unwanted and love them well.
A Hermitess 