To My Grandmother
Beauty encircled my grandmother all her life. Not just because she was a beautiful person, because that she was inside and out. But because she filled her life with beauty. From the jewelry she wore, to the décor of her house, to her paintings, to the White Mountains she made her home, my grandmother made sure that beauty surrounded and abounded. She reveled in the beauty life had to offer and she taught me to do the same.
Some of my favorite memories of my grandmother are from when I was a little girl. She would on occasion take me to this little tea room when we all lived in CT. There we would sit, just the two of us, sipping our delightful tea from delicate china, and eating our dainty finger sandwiches filled with ever so thinly sliced cucumber and salmon. And it of course would always end with the most delicious pieces of lemon or lime tort. I would sit there across the table from my grandmother with her beautiful golden hair and we would talk and giggle and I never felt so elegant, I never felt so refined.
She taught me to love history. Not just the history of our country and the world, but the history of our family. So many times we would be driving from one place to another and she would fill my head with stories of our ancestors from England and Scottland. The clans we came from, and how one, the Ruthvin clan, was even part Viking. I was fascinated, and I could not get enough of the tales of Lettus our ancestor who was the bell of her little New England town, or of just how specifically we are related to the great Ethan Allen of the revolutionary war. I know now that I can attribute my love for history, and my undergraduate major in it to her, and her stories that made the past seem so grand and so very important. But more than that I can attribute my feelings that I have of my deep roots and place in history.
My grandmother was a fiercely independent woman who lived life on her terms.
My grandmother loved her family deeply and profoundly who always made me feel like I was uniquely special and that I could conquer the world and do it with style.
My grandmother was genuinely young at heart all her life here eyes and her spirit always lying about her age. When I look at the pictures of her as a radiant young woman I know that woman was who she stayed inside no matter how many years went by.
Loyal, loving, graceful, beautiful, generous, elegant, youthful, intelligent, independent, my grandmother embodied all of these things.
I will live my life with grace and beauty; I will live my life to the fullest enjoying all it has to offer. I learned that from my grandmother. Every time I put on a beautiful pair of earrings, or listen to a beautiful piece of music. Every time I hang a beautiful painting on my wall or gaze out on a particularly beautiful landscape or even just eat a really good piece of chocolate cake I will think of my grandmother and I know I will feel her there with me.