Picture Book Grandmother

Something has gone awry. This realization has me stymied. First of all, I see clearly that I am not the grandmother that I had long envisioned I would be; apparently, I'm not going to be, ever. Furthermore, I'm hacked to admit this and secondly, topping off this annoyance, summer, I find, is way shorter than it used to be.

Although I can claim to be a fairly credible grandparent, full of fun things to do with diminutive people, ages twenty months to eleven years, still, I am not that perfect granny portrayed in all the picture books. You know the one. She covers her limber physic with a huge flowing linen shirt, her hair is silk, streaked with white and wound up into an off-centered knot, loose tendrils falling out at will. Think Katherine Hepburn. She often wears a big straw hat and smudges of oil paint permanently reside on the side of her nose or cheek. She paints wonderfully, by the way, great sweeping panoramas of the white sandy dunes fringed with sea oats and wispy clouds that kiss the horizon behind the swelling blue-green ocean that is her back yard.

Picture book grandmothers almost always live at the ocean, it turns out, where children can run barefoot in the surf all morning, collecting seashells, chasing hermit crabs and being chased in turn by squealing sea gulls. Then, after lunch, they get a painting lesson or listen with wide-eyed surprise to the ocean-like sounds in a big pink conch shell. They write poems and shell peas on the front porch. Together, child and wizened senior, they weed the garden and pick armloads of flowers as the long, lazy summer inches its way into midyear like a snail on the porch step. Vacation time with grandmother is always memory making... in picture books. More importantly, time spent with this kind of grandmother stands still.

I'm sitting here looking at my garden after granddaughter and I finish reading a couple of library books in the arbor swing. This is when it hits me. The weeds are so tall I hadn't even noticed that my nemesis, the resident neighborhood deer, has chewed my salmon colored begonia to the nub. My garden, the one I permanently damaged my back digging and planting in the spring, is now a wasteland of lanky green wild grasses and bloomless, half eaten perennials. When granddaughter gets up and wanders off to find more interesting things to do than sit with me, I suddenly understand that I'm losing ground in the most subtle of ways.

I am also losing time, I observe.

With more life behind me than in front of me, I am rapidly running out of wiggle room. I don't have the luxury to dawdle and piddle around trying to decide what I want to be later, where I want to end up, whom I want to evolve into. Furthermore, I am truly annoyed to admit that my body is no longer as young as my mind and complains more loudly and often than it used to. My body is no longer so forgiving of my lifting eight foot four by four landscaping timbers anymore. My knees are less than happy about doing the kneeling required in gardening, as well. My back, the biggest whiner of all my parts, rebels continuously; though lifting eight foot four by fours might contribute to this, I concede.

My shortcomings suddenly rush in on me from all sides. It hackles me to note that not only is my hair not long, I am a mediocre painter, at best. And, insult heaped on injury, though I live on a nice lake where grandchildren can plunge into deep water from the top of the dock, I do not live at the ocean in a quaint cottage with a front porch.

Could I be more of a disappointment?

I know that if my grandchildren were polled they would likely vote me in as Grandmother of the Year, I’m that confident in my grandmothering skills. But still there remain those empty credentials in my grandmother resume that will likely never be completed. It is a bittersweet epiphany.

More than anything, this "getting older" thing is a major nuisance because the clock appears to be ticking faster. Summer no longer drifts endlessly like puffy clouds on a warm breeze. The pages on the calendar are flipping furiously as though caught in a gale force wind. July Fourth, which used to be the real start of summer, now flashes by and burns out instantly like a burst of fireworks. Once this date whizzes past, all further summering must be crammed, it seems, into a few short weeks. How absurd is that?

I conclude it boils down to this: I hate being told, "you can't" or "you won't" and I loathe to admit that I very likely will not accomplish all those goals I had set for myself because it is an inexplicable phenomenon of life that time speeds up, as you age, like the last grains of sand in the hourglass. The analogy ends there, though, because you don't get to turn it over and start again. When the sand is gone, it's gone. I can't stop it from flowing and I don't really know how to make peace with this. Maybe I should stop reading those "Grandmother and I" picture books.

Maybe I should write one.