Happy Birthday!

Today is my Grandmother, "Ma Jones", birthday.  She would have been 101 and if she were still alive.  I miss her every single day.  Some days it seems like if I could just sit on her couch while she watched TV or on her screen porch with her it would make it all better.  The older I get the more I miss her.  Isn't that strange? Just this week I watched a video of her in her garden taken in 1991 and I sat and closed my eyes because more than seeing her I just wanted to hear her.

I think she would love the way my children are growing and would be crazy about them. She would be proud of how strong and smart and beautiful and independent my daughter is, and I know she would be smitten like all the girls with my oldest son, and somehow I think she would have a special place just for my little man.  I know her heart would have broken though,over the last year, watching my family dissolve.  She loved my husband dearly and losing him would have been like losing one of her own children, much the way my parents have felt.  It is a loss I am glad she didn't have to endure.  She saw pain in her own life, losing a Mother when she was a small child, a daughter and becoming a Widow at a much too young age.  She hurt when we all hurt and truly was the epitome of "you are only as happy as your least happy child."  She was, on the surface, a pessimist of the greatest kind but seeing her stick her hands in the soil again each Spring tells me somewhere inside there was an eternal optimist.

I love you dearly, Ma.