Sharing Memories (Week 32): Favourite Relative

It's Week 32 of our Sharing Memories - A Genealogy Journey Please join us each Sunday as we share our memories of childhood. Your descendants will be thankful that you did! Write here as a comment, or on your own blog, or in a private journal, but please write!

Who was your favourite relative? Was it Uncle Henry who made monkey faces and chased you around the yard? How about Aunt Linda who always had fresh homemade cookies on the table? Or maybe it was Grandpa Jones who spent hours with you doing whatever you wanted to do.

Mine was my Grandma Bates (my mother's mother). She wasn't a cuddly, kisses and hugs kind of grandmother. She didn't spend hours playing games with me. But she was my favourite.

Grandma had been married three times, a fact I found quite fascinating and exciting. I didn't really get the fact that being twice divorced was a bit different from being twice widowed as Grandma was. I just saw her as carefree and daring and now on her third husband.

She dressed beautifully, usually in red. She loved wearing a red skirt and jacket with white blouse or a red pantsuit with white blouse. And she always wore heels until much later in life. In hot weather she wore shorts and was very proud of her legs! Even in her 70s she would hold her legs out and proclaim them "pretty darn good for an old lady" So unlike my father's mother who wore dark polka-dot dresses, white hair back in a bun, and nylons rolled down to her ankles. None of my friends had a grandmother who looked as good as mine and that made me even more proud of being her granddaughter.

Ruth Simpson, my Grandmother

I loved listening to her stories. She didn't play games with me but she did sit and tell me stories of her childhood in England - of her mom and dad and silbings and her grandparents. She never tired of telling me the same things over and over and I never tired of hearing them. She would show me her treasures - her mother's fish knives and forks (now in my possession), her grandmother's pot lids (I have them now), her first husband's gold pocket watch given him on his 21st birthday by his mom and dad (another treasure now in my keeping).

Grandma was fun to be around. She laughed, she was vivacious. And men adored her. Each of her husbands treated her like a princess.

She died in 1985 and I still miss her.