Beautiful snow. Yeah.

I had a busy morning, running around.  I planned to weave this afternoon, but I got a phone call.
"Mimi?"
"Hi sweet girl." (that's what I call her sometimes)
"My skiing lesson is at 1:45 today."
"Okey dokey, I'll be there."

The plan was that when she went to West Mt this weekend, I would show up and take pictures of her having her lesson, since I bought it for her for Christmas.
So being a good grandmother.......I did.

West Mt isn't the biggest around, but it is a really nice place, and today it was rockin'.

I couldn't find Gabby or my daughter, or anyone for that matter.  So I just took pictures, and looked like I knew what I was doing.
All of a sudden someone whoooooshed up right in front of me.  Luckily, I am not jumpy.
It was my 13 year old grandson, who is my height.  When did this happen???
"Hi Mimi."

So he and his Dad took off up the mountain again, so I could catch them coming down.
Which was harder than it looked, cause everyone looks the same coming at you on skis and snowboards.

But I did manage to get a few good shots.  Of course, by this time I was pretty frozen.  The sun was shining, and if you were moving you were probably OK, but I was standing still.

I am not a downhill skier, but the conditions looked to be awesome, judging by the people that flew by me.
I finally found Gabby, looking a little overwhelmed.

She didn't see me, she was so focused on staying upright.

My daughter looked like a pro, as long as she didn't move.

Before my daughters ever had children, I told them that my future grandchildren would have to call me 'Hilary'.  They were appalled, of course.   Which is why the minute my first grandchild was born, they designated that I was 'Mimi'......trying to head me off at the pass, so to speak.

It isn't that I minded being old enough to be a grandmother.  I just didn't want to be called "Gramma".

Sounds silly, I know.  

But I think I know why. 

My one grandmother came to stay with us for almost a year, when I was five, and died soon after she returned to England.  I don't remember her.  She wanted to eat me up, so my mother tells me.   I wish I remembered that.

My other grandmother, GRAMMA, lived with my aunt and uncle.   She was stricken with rheumatoid arthritis, which she called 'rheumatism'.  They didn't do anything for it back then.   

She was a workaholic, and a bit of a rebel when she was young.  She was the first woman in her little hometown to drive/have her own car.  It was a Model T.  She had a speak easy in her kitchen, and her husband, my grandfather, was a rum runner until he died of pneumonia at the young age of 42,  leaving my grandmother with two small children.  For her  this was no big deal, she had already raised all her brothers and sisters, after her own mother died, and her father drank himself into oblivion.  She even had a part in a silent movie that they shot on the north end of Lake George. 

But by the time I knew her, she was crippled, and nothing like that vibrant woman that she was.  She progressed quickly from a cane, to a walker, to a wheel chair.  Eventually my aunt and uncle could stand it no more, because she was not the most pleasant person to be around.  Bossy,  and unhappy with her situation.  So to the nursing home she went.

I have many memories of her, but one of them is going to the nursing home after school, cutting her toe nails and washing her feet, taking her for a walk, pushing her wheel chair up Lake George Avenue to sit on the small beach at  the end of the lake.  

I longed for her to love me, but it was my cousin, Billy, one day older, that she loved.  It was him that she asked for, and his praises she sang.  Though he seldom came to see her, having more important adolescent things to do, and even though I was the attentive granddaughter who jumped and danced to her tune, ah, I was a GIRL.  And I was not that important in the scheme of things.   I never blamed him.  I knew it was her.

So no, please don't call me Gramma.

Call me Mimi, your adoring, doting, way too generous Mimi.

Gabby says, "Mimi spoils me."  And she is right, I do, and I will.  And someday, when you remember me, it won't be the way I remember my grandmother. 

Being a grandmother is fun.

The best part right now.........

I get to go home and have a hot cuppa tea.

I think my toes are thawing out at last.