My grandmother was my best friend and my biggest fan. She always made me feel so special. We used to go shopping, to greenhouses to look at flowers, put puzzles together...we did everything together. She passed away from cancer when I was 17, I'm 32 now and I still think about her everyday!! I always tell my kids how much she would have loved to meet them.

My grandmother was a minister's widow. She used to remind us girls, "Pretty is as Pretty does."

My mother, her oldest daughter, was a wonderful, caring and patient mother. Mom baked all our bread. It was wonderful. She died before we grew up, so none of us has that recipe, which was just in her head. We were the envy of the other kids in the neighborhood on bread baking day, but we kind of thought Wonder Bread was wonderful since we never had it except at a friend's house.

At one point in time, I managed the medical unit at our county jail. I was at work and called my grandmother (she had dementia). When she asked where I was, I replied, "at the jail" and her response was to ask if I was helping those people. LOL. Gotta love a grandma who could hear I was in jail and still think I was doing good!

Mother was always a "lady".
We never had close talks, but there was her love that I always felt.
Grandmother: Remembering going to the creek behind her home, picking blackberries, in the summer, smashing them with milk and sugar.

I remember the time my Mom, who was less than happy with me at the time, told me she wished I would have six daughters just like me when I got married. And then she got tears in her eyes and said she would never wish that on anybody.
My Mom had a stroke when she was 48....I was 18. I learned from my Mom that with hard work and determination, nothing was impossible. She was unable to move her right side and unable to speak at first. This was before people were hospitalized. Her doc told her she would never be able to do anything except sit in a chair. She worked so hard, was able to do almost everything she had been able to but using her non-dominant left hand. She never gave up.
I remember gathering eggs with my grandma.....and being so special to her. I felt no one ever loved me as much as she did. She died when I was seven.
Once, I was walking home from school to her house and I saw an apple hanging over a fence. I picked it and took it to her....by this time she was bedfast, and she asked me if I asked permission to take it. I told her I had not so she made me take it back and ask permission. I was so shy and felt so bad I had disappointed grandma, I cried all the way to the house. The man who was home listened to my story and told me I could have the apple but next time be sure to ask. I learned a valuable lesson that day.
I also remember my Mom braiding my hair so tight I could barely blink my eyes.
I am sorry my mom died when I was 29 because my children don't really remember her.
Thanks for letting me talk about my Mom.....she died a little over 40 years ago and has been on my mind so much.

I never knew my Grandmothers. They both died before I was born.

My mother told me and my sisters the same thing Sheilajoyce's grandmother told her "Pretty is as pretty does."

Like Glenda's mother, my mother was a lady, and expected her girls to also be ladies. She trusted me completely to do the right thing, and to my knowledge I never disappointed her.

After I was married at age 20, and my DH was sent overseas, I lived at home with my DM and DF. I went back to work and had to work shift. When I came home at 12:30 a.m., my mother was always waiting at the bus stop for me. If I forget everything else, I will never forget that.

Now the tears are falling.

Sue

My best memories are of my paternal grandma. She lived alone and lived just across the field from us. My memories of her are her cooking and baking. I never helped her with it, but I watched her and I can still see how she baked her pies, her cakes, yeast rolls, and how she cut her cabbage for her cole slaw. I also would go with her to the woods and she would dig up the rotted dirt from an old stump, bring it back to the house in her old buckets and heat the dirt on her stove to kill insects and use that for her potting soil. She had a great love of plants. I have very few memories of my other grandma. She didn't speak English and never talked to me. My Mother is still living, but my memories are best kept un said I guess.

Sue

I grew up thinking both of my grandmothers were stern, distrustful of people and life, 'mean'. My maternal grandmother lived with my mother and me from when I was four until she died (90's). My paternal grandmother disappeared from my life when I was six; she and my grandfather stopped contact once my father got his divorce. I saw them once, briefly, when I was ten.

I've gained perspective on both women after doing some family history -- and putting pieces together from an adult's perspective. Both lived through hard times I can't imagine, including the Spanish Flu and the Depression.

My PGM favored her grandons; PGF loved the girls (granddaughters and ALL women). I remember PGM using a hard pinch as a means of correction. She bore seven children; one died at seven; she was often sole support of the family. Her father was an MD in a mining town in Colorado; two of her sisters died before age two; her two brothers died in accidents before they were 25. Her parents chose her husband thinking he would settle near them. (They didn't want to lose her, too.)

MGM seldom smiled or laughed. I remember her scolding that I was wasting hot water while washing the dishes. Water was more precious in her housekeeping days -- pumped from a well outdoors, carried into the kitchen, heated on a wood or coal stove. She'd buried her first infant, her mother and brother, dead of TB, and her DH following a stroke at 60 and a year bedridden. She'd left Scotland as a teenager, sailing a month on the ocean in steerage to NYC.(She NEVER spoke of any of this, nor did my mother.)

I only knew one of my Grandmothers. We lived with her in her house until she died when I was 9. She had had a hard life, she lost two husbands. One to the 1918 Spanish Flu, the second to diabetes. She turned her home into a boarding house, it's the only way she could keep her home . When I was growing up, she still had two tenants living upstairs. She died of stomach cancer. My favorite memory is that every night she would cut up an apple for me. She'd call out "Apple Time" . I still have her paring kniofe that she used to cut the apples.