Following

I ran across the Imagination Prompt Generator today and figured “Hey, I’m Mr. Blog Writer Guy, I could use that.” So I fired it up, and here was my prompt:

“If you could follow someone around for one day (unseen), who would it be and why?”

And it wouldn’t be the president. It wouldn’t be a movie director. It wouldn’t be a rock star. It wouldn’t even be a famous person.

It would be my grandmother.

My grandmother is largely an enigma to me. A wonderful, amazing woman who I am happy to see on the half dozen or so occassions a year I get the chance, but I know so little about her. I remember in school when they stressed to us that we need to interview our grandparents, find out what makes them tick. Listen to their lessons, learn from their mistakes.

Those words came back to me as I buried my grandfather. But I digress.

My grandmother had 5 children, all delivered at home, and raised tobacco and kids on a shoestring budget. She lived, and still lives, in “the holler”, a place found only deep in the woods after 3–4 miles of driving on unpaved road. I worry and wonder about living in such a place. Her town, Sneedville, a town small by its very name, sits in the middle of nowhere, with no cell phone access and in a mountainous region of north Tennessee. The Virginia state line is mere minutes away.

There is history to my mother’s maiden name, Greene, particularly in that town. According to most over there, I’m related to most over there. But I wouldn’t know it, as I haven’t been to the town in years except for an emergency gasoline fill-up during a July 4th get-together.

I simply don’t know my Grandma as I should. And I believe to see her routine, to see the things that she finds importance, to witness the elegance of single living with a woman who desperately misses her partner (she never ‘officially’ married the man I called grandpa, as she was bound to life to my mother’s father…), who may yearn for companionship, but who may also find living alone has its perks. The What Ifs can fill books, but the knowing can only come by being there, seeing it happen, and experiencing it myself.

It may not be as exciting as watching rock stars get wasted and entertain thousands, but I would learn nothing about myself or my own history by doing that, now would I?

Sorrow drips into your heart through a pinhole
Just like a faucet that leaks and there is comfort in the sound