Grandparents

Journey

The smell of plexiglass and rubber seals reached me as I dazed out the oblong window watching white lines flash by my small frame of vision. I absently passed my fingers back and forth on the striped, carpeted seats.

I thought they looked luxurious. The seats were soft and full of color. Vertical stripes were running up and down them, going somewhere.

Like me, like us.

I glanced over at Nanny.

Funny.

Back then I called her Nanny. As I got older, when referencing her to others, somewhere along the line I would start to call her Grandmom. I can't fully explain why. Perhaps to differentiate her from my other Nanny?

Maybe.

Whatever the reason, until the day she moved on, I called her Nanny when talking to her directly.

Anyway, back to my Grandmom.

I have no idea what we talked about that day. I don't even know if we gabbered on a bit the whole way there, or if we just enjoyed each others' silence.

Our relationship was like that.

We were content no matter the situation. Sometimes we did nothing more than enjoy one another's quiet presence.  Other days, we would have great conversations, from the most trivial or mundane to the highly controversial and scientific.

Grandmom loved the medical sciences.

She taught me to question everything about life and the medical establishment.

"Like fun," my Grandmom'd say when people gave her 'the facts.'

Then she went about her business doing impossible things as she saw fit, almost always proving her skeptics, and their medical 'science' wrong. Grandmom had her own brand of healing.

Mind you, she wasn't a vengeful person.

No, Grandmom wanted to live her life to the fullest, true to herself and for the benefit of her loved ones.

And she did, healing many in her wake with her grade school-level education fortified with the fort knocks of a tough life. Black sab, epsom salts, Vicks vapor rub, you name it. She had it all, except a degree.

Grandmom was real old school.

As we pulled into the bus depot at the end of our two-hour drive, and thanked the navy-uniform-capped driver for our suitcases, which he unloaded from the cargo area of the large metal bus we'd just stepped out of, we looked towards our walk ahead and smiled.

We had arrived.

Together.

Our journey had just begun.