Annie was named after a very special person in my life. Anna Elizabeth Leitch was my grandma (mother's mother). Today would have been her birthday. She wasn't one of those grandmas who coddled you all the time. She was nice and she loved us, but if you put a foot out of line, she let you know it. Some random things I remember about her. She loved hummingbirds and cats. She always had Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies in her pantry, and she always had the good cereals. She wore dentures so she could take her lower lip and put it up over her nose. She could float in a pool with her just her feet and head up out of the water. She would buy us stuff off of QVC. She made Finnish Silver Dollar pancakes and they always tasted best when she'd burn them just a little bit(I make them with Alex now...just a little bit burned). She had a cat name Kisa who was the meanest cat I've ever met. She would let us use the manual hand mixer when she was cooking. She always had pudding pops when we'd come to visit. She had wild foxes and raccoons that she feed behind her property. She loved Frank Sinatra. She permanently hurt her knee when playing with some crutches. She played bingo. She would get me a Baskin Robins mint chocolate ice cream cone whenever we went to the Commissary. She worked at a hospital as a Pink Lady for years and years and years. She had pictures of the beach and the ocean all over her house. She was so fun to talk to. My mom now has the hands I remember grandma having. And I have the hands I remember my mom having.
My grandma wasn't afraid to speak her mind and she had quite the spunky attitude. My mom tells the story about Anna when she was 7 or 8. She was playing down at the beach with her friends. A man walked up to her and her friends and opened his trench coat revealing also that he had no cloths on underneath, and that doing this sort of thing obviously exited him. All of her friends ran quickly away. My grandma looked at the man and looked at his thing and then back up at him and said, "My daddy's is bigger." She just wasn't scared of much.
Annie was born about 6 years after grandma passed away. I'm disappointed that I never got to introduce Shaun to her, so I really hope that Annie and grandma had some laughs before Annie came to me, and I can't wait to see her again.
2 comments:
I can really see a lot of your Grandma in Annie! Maybe they'll have similar personalities.
Awwww. Penny, stop making me cry with all these good memories. Oh man, Grandma was a tough lady and so much fun. Remember finally making it to our teenage years and being able to sit in her "living room", or the mechanical cat that we'd use to chase the younger kids around....
Post a Comment