If you are in a Christmas hurry--don't feel like you have to read the whole thing--I just wanted to share it.
Grandma Hope, I called her “Mama” because that is what my mom called her—was the single most influential person in my life, after my mom and dad and sister Susan.
Mama taught me about the importance of family traditions. She taught me that there is meaning and connection in our family rituals. When I was little, every Friday after Thanksgiving, she and my mom and Susan and I went Christmas shopping. We ate at Bishops Buffet and got the same ham, French fries and chocolate pie every year. Every year she and Grandpa came to Eldridge on Christmas Eve. Come rain or snow, they pulled in the drive before dark. They never missed a year. Before they arrived, my mom had everything ready and perfect—candles lit—hair in rag curlers, and we tried to nap while we waited and waited for them. When at last they honked the horn in the drive, we unloaded from the car, the box of gifts, without name tags. Every year we helped put the gift tags on from the same little box of tags, stored in a baggie, with a clothes pin fastening it shut of course. Year after year, Christmas Eve dinner, we fished the oysters out of the oyster stew and gave them to Grandpa, settling for the warm milk that was left behind.
Every year she and Grandpa came back only two weeks later in January to celebrate my birthday. And every summer I spent two weeks alone with them on the farm. This is where I learned that Mama did everything better. The laundry. One of my first complete sentences was “Mama washy better.” She toilet trained me. She did everything better. This included her home made vanilla pudding—three egg yolks, 2/3 cup sugar, ¼ teaspoon salt, 3 heaping tablespoons of flour, and 2 cups 2% milk—add butter and vanilla at the end. Lastly, but very important, you must cover the bowl with wax paper and fasten with a rubber band. Years later I realized that the true secret was that she stood there and stirred it the whole time it cooked. No lumps. She never left the stove. She never multitasked like we all do nowadays. Never. Sometimes this made Grandpa have to wait a long time.
Her unwillingness to multitask was integral to her most treasured characteristic, her ability to listen deeply. Mama listened deeply. My first experience with this came at the very tender age of four years old. Little four-year-old Sara Jo—I poured out my heart to her. I told her about how I had never really been happy. At four years old, I had never truly been happy because I was bored—bored of watching my mom clean up after the cats. Hope was probably holding back hysterical laughter, but she listened. She listened sitting down. Incidentally you also knew she was listening because she took notes. Really good notes. A lot of notes. Sometimes that wasn’t such a good thing. But in the very best way, her ability to listen deeply has carried through my whole life—right up to a few months ago when she listened without interrupting, without trying to fix things, this time--to a not such a little girl Sara Jo—pour out my heart again, this time about my sick dad. She just listened. Deeply.
Mama taught me that there is meaning in objects, not in a materialistic way, but in a way that preserves history and family stories. Consequently my home and garden are filled with memories of she and Grandpa. We have volunteer pines trees from their forests, and hundreds of ferns have grown in my garden from the seedlings I transplanted from north of their house. The rocks in our Eagan fireplace were handpicked from Grandpa’s fields, and carried one pickup load at a time from the 80 to Minnesota. We are still burning wood in our fireplace that Uncle Dave and Grandpa split. Everywhere I look around me I have reminders of the legacy of my Grandparents and the memories I share with them. That made Hope happy. It makes me happy too.
All these memories and stories we can share are really special to me, but the greatest legacy that Hope leaves with me, is the legacy of her faith. She and I talked about our faith together, but mostly Hope gave me books. All with a hand written message and date in the front cover. She gave me my first Bible, and C.S. Lewis books. Then came books by Martin Luther, Oswald Chambers, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, and the list could go on and on. My favorite was Madeleine L’Engle. Last January when she moved and I took home a stack of books—her Madeleine L’Engle was as dog-eared and highlighted as mine. We highlighted many of the same lines. She would have called that a “God incidence.” She found God incidences everywhere. I think actually her whole life was a God incidence to me. One of her favorite words—we all know the magnet on her fridge—was: Shalom. And her favorite song was “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” So, Hope is finally in complete peace now, the ultimate Shalom, ready for an eternity of God incidences and we will go forth and each in his own way continue her legacy. Shalom.
Sara Stephens Kotrba
Eagan, Minnesota
December 20, 2010
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