Foothills of Childhood - Part 6

***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words.  It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail.  well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several.  So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here.  Okay?

It was shortly thereafter that my father decided to build us a small modest but new home just five miles down the road in a tiny village called Reno.  Our house by the railroad tunnel and depot was now condemned and marked for demolition.  The move meant we would share a trailer with my Father's parents, Gramma and Grampa Earley.  

Grandma Earley was a short rotund lady who laughed a lot, a quiet but full-to-the-heart laugh, and she was now hobbling around with the aid of her cane.  She too had been the victim of a few strokes; determination was her best point too, and she would not give up or give out.  

My remaining relatives recall her as a nasty mean cantankerous bitchy woman, but I never saw it.  She really favored me, and I felt that.  I sat next to her in her winter cold home, before the move to the trailer, when she had the ultraviolet heat lamp on to warm her rheumatic legs.  She crocheted and knitted terrible looking caps and mittens, things I gladly accepted from the loving giver/creator of gifts.  

When we all came to share the trailer together during the building of the new small house, I never noticed any change in her.  But of course she must have been terribly unhappy at leaving her house of many long years, her incredible dense wall of thick dark emerald ivy, her gardens of multi-colored zinnias, hollyhocks, hibiscus, all those personal rooms and items she tended for so many years with such care, now gone to be replaced by a trailer and new family in this small space.

Still, that didn't show.  Until one day she began to cry.  

Sometimes thereafter I would see her sitting on the lounger under the awning at the side of the trailer home, holding a hanky to her eyes, her body softly quivering in sobs.  I asked her what was wrong.  She never could tell me.  

Then one day I knew something terrible was wrong with her.  I went to our almost finished house next door and got my Mother.  She made me go into the back-bedroom of the trailer as we returned to Grandma and wait....    All I could hear was moaning, groaning over and over.   It was awful.  I was angry.   I muttered quietly under my breath in that back-room with my hands on my ears, "Please, just shut up.  Stop.   Stop it!"  No one could hear me, but myself.  I was angry, she was dying and I still would not cry.  It was my Grandmother's final stroke.