My Gran - 1918 - 2009

Today would have been my wee gran's 93rd birthday.

She lived to the ripe old age of 91 and I am so lucky to have had her as part of my life for so long.  And not only me, but my little boy as well.   A loved his Great Gran to bits.  It was a joy to watch them together, like kindred spirits.  Separated in age by 78 years yet totally on the same wavelength.

She taught him loads of old Scottish songs, some of them I am sure she made up!  When she sang them to him I would immediately be transported back to my own childhood and the memories of her singing them to me would overhelm me for a moment and summon those feeling of total safety and comfort that can only be experienced by a child in the warm embrace of a loving relative.

Now of course I have to sing them for A and he demands them at the stangest of times, in the most inconvenient of places (eg sitting in the Doctor's surgery!!) but I always oblige and we share a moment of pleasure together in memory of her.

Today's blip is a poem I wrote for her when I was 11 years old.  There was no occasion prompting me to write it, it just came to me one bleak January day in 1979 and I wrote it on a piece of paper torn from my homework jotter. I still remember sitting on the rug by her coal fire, writing it down in my best writing.

One day, a few weeks before her 80th birthday, I was visiting her and she went into her purse and pulled out a very yellowed, tatty and well thumbed piece of paper and handed it to me.  I carefully opened it and was utterly astonished to find my little poem, in my childish scrawl.   She had carried it with her every day since the day I wrote it.

For her 80th birthday I typed it up, printed and framed it with a pic of her and me as a a child.  It hung on her livnig room wall for 11 years till the day she died.  It is now in my care and a most cherished possesion along with the original, which I laminated and keep in my box of priceless things.

Happy Birthday Gran.  Love you. xxx