Today’s post comes from my friend Marie. Marie and “Old Blue Eyes” are just about the kindest people you could ever meet. Marie has not had the easiest time becoming a mom or walked the easiest road of motherhood, but she’s one of the very best. I’ve been humbled by her many times, not because she’s said anything to me, but just because she takes such joy in her boys and says, sincerely, the sweetest things like that she misses her oldest when he’s at school. As someone who spends too much energy figuring out where else I can send my kids to buy myself some time, she helps me remember that they are precious and time is short, and I should spend more energy delighting in them.
You don’t have to know Marie very well to know that she’s grounded. I love the life lessons she shares today that she learned from her grandmother, and I love that she still saves foil! Moo taught her about priorities and love, and Moo’s legacy is alive and well in her lovely granddaughter.
I thought of my own grandmother so many times reading about Marie’s. I hope it stirs up as many happy memories for each of you!
A Story about my Grandmother Marie Therese
Moo, as I called her, was and always will be one of the dearest people to me for she shaped my life in so many facets, some that I to this day am still discovering. I long to speak with her, even 12 years after her death, to ask so many questions, and to feel the loving comfort she gave me. To understand her, this vibrant woman filled with so many stories and windows into this great big world, I will start with accounts I remember so vividly of her birth and subsequently her life that shaped her into the woman she was.
Born prematurely in 1931 to an “older mother”, father, and a 17-year-old brother, it was surprising she survived. She, as a beautiful young child, helped her mother place hot food on the back porch for African-American workers, who at the time were sorely discriminated against. “People are people, Marie” she would say to me later. She was plucked from the crowd at a train station once by Teddy Roosevelt himself to be held up and doted on, as Presidents do. And helped deliver hot meals to soldiers they housed in the upper rooms of their large home during the Depression to earn extra money. I remember these stories and loved hearing her accounts of life in the big city and a time so very foreign to me. Surely this time in her life shaped (silly to my 8-year-old self) her habit of saving foil in squares just in case you need them later. I still do this to this day because she taught me not to be wasteful.
As a young 31-year-old mother of three, she packed her family along with my grandfather, and moved to Holland for his work. She tells stories of every European country they visited, all but Berlin, Germany, which was unsafe at the time. My mother always teased her about her bottle of wine she kept for their drives through the Swiss Alps. I loved these stories, sitting at her dining room table in a room filled with beautiful pieces of glass she collected around the world. She would find the most expensive one, and fill the glass with wine (I was old enough then), as we sat and talked about life in Europe. She taught me that things in life are just that, things with no real value.
Later, after I was born and quite young, she would go on to live in Saudi Arabia, Greece, and Iran. Odd places (to me at the time) that seemed so different, and so scary. But she went, and loved it. Saudi she’d say was her favorite “because every morning you wake up the world looked different”. I loved this because she taught me about adventure and that you cannot control how the wind will blow the sand in life. You just have to look out and love it.
And as a young girl, I would visit her in Houston and subsequently in Galveston where they built a home, and I loved our outings. She would often visit a friend she had who lived in the 5th ward of Houston who swept the cleanest dirt floors I’ve ever seen, and then hop over to shop at Sakowitz downtown. She loved fiercely and lived outside the boundaries of social norms that delegated who or what or how she “should feel” about herself or anyone else. “Hold your head high Marie”, she would say, “and don’t allow anyone to make you feel less or any more”. She gave me value in myself, not material goods, and taught me how to be humble.
She passed 5 months before I’d marry my love, but she was able to meet and love him too. “Old blue eyes”, she would call him, “is a keeper”. I still agree with her. And those two blue-eyed boys we have would hold her heart! I find comfort in thinking she is in Heaven and maybe she was meant to go long ago, because I have lost even more this year and a half. I feel at peace thinking she is there in Heaven holding my two beautiful blue-eyed babies, a little boy and a little girl, I didn’t get to meet. As we passed a milestone this Easter week, when our sweet girl would have joined us, I thought of my grandmother born on the same day. Her voice, and giggles, and joy and wished one more time I could have found comfort from her, my Moo, and her unending love for me that I know transcends to the day. That big love she taught me to have often brings great pain, but it also gives me peace.
So, I write this story to celebrate my grandmother, to remember my babies, and to remember that as you say “the story continues and love never dies”.
We remember with you, Marie. People are people. Things are things. You cannot control how the wind will blow the sand in your life. You just have to look out and love it. Incredible lessons from two incredible women. Thank you so much, Marie.