Dear Lily,
This is a picture of five generations. This is your ma’am, me, my father Glenn, his mother Katherine (all the kids called her KK), and KK’s mother Katherine (all the kids called her Kat). This was at Kat’s house in Florida, where we all visited her for her birthday that year at my Uncle Mike’s urging – five generations, he said. Gotta get those pictures while you can.
And he was right – not everybody is lucky enough to know any of their great-grandparents, never mind more than one of them. And I always think that is really sad, so that’s one of the reasons I try so hard to write all the stories down and keep track of things in our family. I want you and the little cousins in our family to be able to read about this stuff even if we can’t have family dinners like we used to, even if you don’t ever get to come to my house some weekend and help me pick blackberries and feed the chickens and look at these old pictures and hear these stories.
So Kat was my great grandmother. Now I never did get to know my great grandfather Neal, her husband, because he died way before I was born. But this is what he looked like.
Kat was an absolute riot and I loved her very much. Because she lived pretty far away in Florida, we didn’t get to see her as often as we got to see our other great grandparents, but she would come to Alabama to visit at holidays and we visited her sometimes when I was little and then when I was a teenager, too.
She liked to play golf and have dinner with her friends and have a gin and tonic cocktail at five o’clock. Your ma’am might not want me telling you this story until you’re older, but since all bets are off in crazy plague world where I haven’t even gotten to sing you happy birthday, I’m just gonna tell you the stories as they come up and we’ll just see how it all goes down in family history.
So KK had a brother named Monty, and we were all at Monty and his wife Euber’s house around Christmas one day. Kat was there visiting from Florida, and KK was there too. Kat made herself a gin and tonic cocktail, and KK said, “Now Mother, do you really think you should have that?” (She didn’t say it out loud, but you could tell she was thinking, “You’re 84 years old and maybe that’s too old to be drinking cocktails.” She liked to worry about Kat.)
And Kat said, “Katherine, I’m 84 years old. I guess I can have whatever I please.” (Kat didn’t like to be worried about.)
And that was Kat – she did what she wanted and she lived life on her own terms, and what she wanted was to live on her own in Florida, to play golf every day with her friends, to visit her family at holidays, and to drink that gin and tonic cocktail every day at five o’clock. And for KK to mind her own business 🙂
Oh, and in case it isn’t immediately apparent from the picture, I’m sorry, Lily, but you’re probably gonna need glasses before you’re out of 4th grade!
love,
your grandmother
Karma Soup 