Grandma.

This morning was nice. Ordinarily Eva takes some time reading books and listening to music in the playroom, but since the CD player recently died, I spooled up into the bowels of Verison FIOS and put on one of those all music channels. We chose "Classic Country," which leaned less towards Hank Williams and Buck Owens and more, oddly enough, to the golden years of George Jones and Ronnie Millsap. I folded laundry, and Eva dressed in church shoes and her tutu and pretended to be Yoko, the Japanese cat. Silas slept uptairs.

The station was deep into country hits from the '80s. It was raining outside and cozy inside, and I felt a little like I was back at my Grandma's house, where WAKG was constantly on the radio. I still remember that Ricky Skaggs was born in July, because apparently the overnight DJ used to toss out random bits of trivia between sets of songs. When Grandma couldn't sleep, she would lie there and memorize the stats, filling my head with random facts as I got ready for the bus in the morning.

She lived next door to us my entire life. Initially, it was she and my Grandfather, but he died when I was twelve, and I never really got to know him. Grandma runs so deep in me that I think about her almost every day. I look at my children and know so powerfully how much she would have loved to meet them. Over lunch today I told Eva how Silas had her deep, chocolatey brown eyes, and Eva solemnly intoned, "I miss her." It was equal parts ridiculous and breath-takingly touching, since she died four months before Mr. Milkweed and I got married.

I'm pretty sure Silas is going to be our last child. Had he been a girl, he would have been Juniper Frances. Frances was my grandmother's middle name, and she told me once that she wished that had been her first name. Her first name she hated-- it was Gertrude, which was shortened to Gertie, which became "Dirty Gertie" in the mouths of her nine brothers. As it is, Silas' middle name is Bonham, which was the maiden name of Mr. Milkweed's own sweet Grandma. She used to make him brown cows, which he ate sprawled out on her living room floor while watching Hee-Haw. I used to watch that with my Grandma, too.

Yes, my Grandma would have loved our children, but every time I drive past a filling station, I say a little prayer of thanks that she's not alive to see gas prices today. She sometimes refused to drive when gasoline went above 99 cents per gallon. I'm pretty sure $3.50 a gallon would kill her all over again. I will say that it's nice to live under the same Virginia sky she was used to. When we lived in Ohio, she always told me that she wished I didn't live so far away.

Today, like so many days, I wished she wasn't so far away, too.

Silas and Eva are so lucky that we live in the same state as both sets of grandparents. They have my mother, who is giggly, silly, soft-spoken Nana, and Mr. Milkweed's mother, who is a hands-on, down on the floor, playing all the games Grandma of their own. If they're like me, they won't know how lucky they are until much later in life, when maybe they'll write similarly nostalgic and depressing blog posts of their own. One can always hope. ;'}