Grandma and Grandpa Go To The Mailbox ~~ Friday, May 6, 2022
It was a dark and rainy day. The forest was gurgling and the driveway from hell was slurpy moss-covered treachery for the purple crocks Grandma chose to wear to go down to the mailbox. But I better start at the beginning.
It’s the late-morning mail preparation time for outbound birthday and thank you cards. Tons of award-winning efforts are made by the two elders merging their cognitive skills in printing address labels, addressing envelopes, choosing stamps, and deciding to lick-or-not-to-lick. Finally the doings culminate in Grandpa dressing in his bright blue raincoat to walk the four pieces of mail down the driveway from hell to the little green 4007 mailbox across the street so Grandma can work on cleaning up the heaped mess of paper, envelopes, stamps, pens, stickers, and address books. He’s down there a pretty short time before Grandma realizes she forgot to put pieces of tape over the home-made, water-soluble address labels, so she picks up the five-pound dual-roll tape dispenser, puts on her chartreuse raincoat and slips into her purple crocks, thinking to take along the big Shakespeare umbrella so Grandpa can keep it over the opening of the mailbox and hold the dispense for her while she tapes the labels.
But that part of the story doesn’t happen until after Grandma doesn’t even get ten steps along the top of the driveway from hell before she biffs it big time when her smooth-bottomed, purple crocks encounter the first of the endless slimy patch of sopping moss, smacking her down like a hockey puck across the ice, or like Charlie Chaplin slipping on the banana peel, or like the Olympic skater biffing it in the flourishing finish of the triple axel, double lux. The tape dispenser lets go of the two tape rolls and the Shakespeare umbrella follows her down, the handy crutch up it would be were it not for Grandpa hoofing it mightily uphill towards the bright green and purple train wreck. Shakespeare pops open upon impact to add to the color, chaos and action of the scene. Meanwhile Grandma isn’t even thinking about broken hips or anything other than how fast it all happened on her watch, and how she’d better take this judgement failure of hers about the appropriate footwear for slimeway trekking down 16% grades on slurpy rain days, and add it to her rehab program in detoxing from judgements of other people’s lack of judgement, lying there being a judgmental error of her own. “What will my kids say?” she thinks when she finally does wonder if she’s now one of those ‘oops, I lost my concentration walking,’ old break-yer-hip ladies. But no. She gets up, laughing. The two of them trundle down the rest of the driveway from hell and across the street to the mailbox. He tenderly keeps the umbrella over them and holds out the tape dispenser for her, kindly saying nothing remotely like, “Was it worth it?” They’ve been together for twenty-three years. She finds there is only one label needing taped. And it was a ‘return address label.’ All that for nothing, their faces say to each other. He smiles. She laughs. They cross the street carefully, looking both ways.
Happy Grandma was still in one piece!
A delightful tale with a positive theme overall…
I enjoyed the injections of colour too which gave
an interesting visual elevation to the story…
Heartwarming rescue by Grandpa!
A charming and beguiling peek into the simple, yet studied nature of aging seniors gifted with the ability to still laugh at their uncertainties. The use of color was perfectly chosen, giving the pair a subtle youthful persona. The details were revealed at just the right time and continually reminded us that one of the traits of getting older is the propensity one has for routine. Beautifully expressed.
You made me think both about my mother and my grandmother. My mother, the great communicator, kept up with countless birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, etc. for numerous family and friends spending part of every day checking her lists and probably typing most of the addresses on that old Royal typewriter with the dirty font.
My uncle put my grandmother in a wonderful brand-new assisted living freestanding apartment with walkways connecting all the little units to the central community building. She started writing the weekly newsletter for the community. They had sunken garbage cans with step-on pedals that opened the cover so they could drop their garbage in… Very convenient.
One winter day she walked out to drop her garbage in and slipped on the ice falling to the concrete and breaking her hip. She got one of the first hip replacements that I ever heard of. Unfortunately, when she started to suffer from Alzheimer's, my uncle put her in a nursing hospital where she shared a room with an energetic 98-year-old woman. When I visited, the woman had taken the bus to the funeral of her last child, on their own and wasn't in the room. My grandmother wanted to show me something. So she moved a chair to the closet and gingerly jumped up on the chair to grab a box from the top shelf saying cheerfully, "They don't want me to do this, but I have to show you."
I don't remember what she showed me, maybe a picture. But a couple of years later when I visited, she just stared into space, but seemed to recognize me even though cataracts probably obscured her vision. Within two years she died at 90.
A naïve councilman and a down-on-her-luck single mom try to save their county’s last stand of forest from greedy developers and a dysfunctional government.
