Mamaw

Mamaw smelled of Chantilly, and her laugh carried through a room. My mom always said I was partial to her, my mama’s mother. Mamaw and Papaw would visit us, driving from Indiana, when I was a girl. I would see their car turn down Southminster Road toward our little, light-blue split-level, and I would drop my bike and run to meet them, yelling back to my sister that grandma was here. She would read to us, or we would watch while she made chicken noodle soup or spaghetti. Papaw always brought us packs of gum and stuffed animals, and we loved that, but Mamaw mostly just brought herself. Of course, everyone knew that she loved a good knick-knack, and we’d get cute little things for our birthdays and Christmas. One time I told her I liked her necklace, a long gold chain with little pearls strung onto it every few inches, and she took it off and gave it to me. It’s hanging on my jewelry tree beside me, right now. Still, the things I hold onto most from my grandma aren’t tangible.

Mamaw was everything I love about the women in my family. She was spunky and easy to laugh, but also critical and quick to say what she thought about something. Both of these can be good and bad — I have learned to temper both instincts in certain situations. But there is a raw, authentic quality to the women related to Joyce Dunn, and I am grateful to have inherited it. When the Dunn women are together, the three sisters that Joyce mothered, I am at my happiest. I love the laughter, the wine, the shopping. I love the honesty (usually). I love how weird everyone is, dancing at inopportune moments, laughing at things that shouldn’t be laughed at. There is a joy to these women, and also an edge. There is a paradox in all of us, that we enjoy the little things and also crave the grand and adventurous. It’s a strange legacy to have walked into, like being born into a whirlwind of dirt and glitter, but I wouldn’t trade it. And it’s Mamaw, and those who came before her, who began it all.

Joyce became a mom at 19. I will never know the reality of that experience. She raised her children in small-town Jonesboro, Indiana, and then moved with my grandpa to Florida when I was young, maybe five or six. They moved back to Gas City, Indiana when I was in seventh grade. I remember unpacking the boxes at their new house on Walnut Street in my Aeropostale pajama pants, pulling up carpet and setting out furniture. It became my favorite place in the world, that little ranch near Main Street, within walking distance of the high school, the CVS and the Circle K. We went on road trips regularly to visit my grandparents when they lived in that house. The week after the seventh Harry Potter book came out, we packed up our van with family friends to make the three-hour trek, my eyes still puffy from crying through Fred’s death. I took my friend Kelly there in 8th grade, and we caught crawdads in the creek and made brownies at midnight. When I decided to go to Anderson University in Indiana, my best friends Hannah and Lisa and I road-tripped to the school and stayed at that house — we were seventeen. At nineteen, Lisa and I would stay the night a few summers later on our road-trip to Chicago and Duluth, Minnesota.

Probably the best decision I made as a young person was to go to school near my grandparents. They would come down to Anderson on a Sunday and take me out to the Cracker Barrel. They were the first to meet my (second) college boyfriend and report their thoughts back to my family, which conveniently happened the same morning that my grandma lost a tooth. My boyfriend didn’t seem to care, and my family still laughs about it. On a particularly confusing and fraught week during my Junior year, I drove to their house crying, walking in without knocking and sitting down at the little table in the kitchen for salmon patties and a little bit of extra love. Mamaw always had cookies waiting for me if she knew I was on my way, and if it was warm out she was usually in the yard when I pulled up, gardening or sitting on the porch swing. She’d hug me goodbye every time with a kiss on the head and “I love my Laura.”

In 2020, when we were doing church online, my mom and I road-tripped to Indiana regularly. We had Christmas there that year, and Thanksgiving there the year after. When we lost Papaw in December of 2019, we all naturally gravitated toward spending more time with Mamaw at the house. We’d splay out on her couches, reading books and watching TV. We’d go to our favorite bookstore and coffee shop, drinking honey lattes and spending too much money at the T. J. Maxx in Marion. That house and that city have always been my favorite place to be, and those people are still my favorite company to keep.

At our coffee shop in Indiana. Not sure who gave me the ten dollars, but I usually never had to pay for my own coffee.

It is sad how you don’t always realize these things until a person is dying, or until you’ve had to say a permanent kind of goodbye. I am not someone who is quick to love. I’m deeply independent, and while I’m quick to show affection, and to feel warmly toward people, dependent love takes time to form itself in me. I don’t take to it quickly, because I have learned how hard the goodbyes are. But my grandma was there before I learned to fear goodbyes, and so I clung to her easily as a young child. As I got older, I began to wonder after every visit if it was the last time I would see her, I so feared her death. I always made sure that my grandparents never left without my giving them a proper goodbye, just in case. I had been preparing myself to lose her for at least twenty years, and I still wasn’t ready. It feels unreal, and empty. We cannot prepare ourselves to lose the ones we love — we can only love them, right here, right now.

When my grandparents lived in Florida we went down to visit a few times. The first time we went I was in second grade, and had just started piano lessons. I took my Suzuki book and would tap the rhythm to the first song, Honeybee, just as my instructor had taught me to do. I don’t know if this is a real memory, or just a dream I’ve had over and over again, but I remember sitting in that condo, knowing my grandma was near, that everyone I loved was around me, letting that feeling soak in as I tapped out that song and hummed it aloud. The air was soft and humid, and I felt at peace. I still tap that song out to this day, mostly when I feel content and happy in my own skin. It’s that same feeling I experienced in Florida at eight years old — of being surrounded, cocooned by those I love the most. It is that feeling, more than anything, that I think is Mamaw’s legacy to me: a reminder to let myself be open, to allow myself to be vulnerable and dependent, so that the warmth can settle in.

Here’s to you, Mamaw — you spunky, strong, light of a woman. I love you, and I’ll see you again.