My Grandma's house

My sister inspired me today by talking about my paternal grandmother. It made me think of mom's mother. In our family the most beloved, revered, and cherished grandmother, was Grandma Norris . She was our favorite Grandmother, because she made us each feel as we were her favorite grandchild. The truth be told she had thirty something favorite grandchildren!

What I have thought about a lot in the following years since her death is that last visit in that house. My parents moved from Iowa to California in the late 1950's, so we all stayed in that house on various summer vacations through the years. It was a very small house, a living room, a kitchen, and a small bedroom, in which when indoor plumbing came around the bathroom was constructed in the closet. The upstairs consisted of 2 bedrooms, which was actually an attic with slanted ceilings to the contour of the roof. In those upstairs rooms,(called the North and the South bedrooms.) I had slept in those beds many times. They were old beds, the kind where the springs were exposed under the mattress's. The rooms were stuffed with a bunch of things like coffee pots, remnants of material for making quilts, old clothes, Christmas decorations, canned food in mason jars, winter clothes. On this last visit I slept with my wife in the north room in the old rickety bed and slept better that night than I had in years, and I haven't had a better night sleep since. We awoke that next morning to the smell of coffee, and to the sound of little Norris feet scampering on the floor below, not the feet of Grandma, but of my Mom, and my aunt Mary. Even though grandma was gone her spirit that had filled that house through the years was still there. I have no material things to remember her by, but those wonderful feelings and memories will live on as long as I'm alive!