Granmere was my step grandmother. She wrote my grandfather after her classmate, Susan had died, and they became friends, and then more, and he invited her to be his wife and come be the head of his household in beautiful victorian Cambridge Massachusetts.
At night she wore a pink bed jacket, which she had trimmed with lace on the outside, nice buttons, and with ribbon at the waist, so it would last longer with the washings.
Between her room and my grandfather's room there was a secret closet, with a door between which they could travel with no one knowing.
Every room in the house had a fireplace. This was a beautiful home with a grand wood staircase and three floors and a basement.
Everything would unravel after my father died, leaving his four children the trunks of his father, and those who came before. A thick 6 inch wide leather bible. Army clothes and badges and patches. Swords and citations. Pictures known and unknown. All this history, come down, with us having no time to look at it.
Grandmere had perfumes in her closet that had a mirror above drawers. She had the perfumes displayed. She had a silver trimmed comb and a silver backed mirror, and a big beautiful diamond ring.
Grandmere would change into her bed clothes in the evening after she put away the dinner's dishes. I could go in to watch Loveboat with her. She would dose. Then I would kiss her goodnight and turn off the light.
I got to stay in my grandfather's room, in his bed for 8 months in 1976, when I was 18.
Grandmere wore a pink bed jacket at night while she sat up in bed and darned clothes, fixed a button, read or watched her tiny TV.
I would pull the oh so small wooden rocking chair with the odd lime green pillow she had made for it, over to her bedside to watch with her.
Granmere is the only person I ever knew to wear a bed jacket; a pretty pink bed jacket which she had made just as she liked.
She died sometime in the 1990s. She wanted nothing to do with her family. She wanted to be gone. And so with my last call to her she said, do not call anymore. And she had a way of being stern. My father's older brother's ex-wife, the first daughter in law in the family, was a nurse and came down from New Hampshire to help care for her. I, once so close, was far away in Maryland, having left Massachusetts in 1994, when my divorce was final, and when I learned my father would be nearby in Maryland for six months before leaving again.
Those six months would be the last six months of my father's life, and I was there for that. In being close to my father, I was no longer near my grandmere.
Tonight, 15 years later, in 2008, yet farther away from Massachsetts, in North Carolina, I felt chilly and wanted to put on a bed jacket, which I don't have, and I remembered her, my granmere, how she wore one every night over her nightgown.