Comfort food

Grandma Adams pounded the dough for her mincemeat pie. Her 94 year old fingers looked like sausage and she wore surgical stockings under her paisley dress, but who cared that she didn't look like Farrah Fawcett? She made the best mincemeat pie, but her biscuits really knocked everyone's socks off. I stayed with Nanny and Granddad that Christmas week, a surprise gift for Nanny. She always liked one of the grandchildren to visit during the holidays and this year (Jimmy Carter's first year in office) with her own mother there as well and making the same mincemeat pie she'd done for the past seventy Christmases, she had a special treat. She sure did deserve it. Granddad's Alzheimer's was becoming unbearable (he'd started urinating in his pants and couldn't control his farting now) and her rheumatoid arthritis was making it hard for Nanny to get up and down the stairs.

I stayed in the third-floor bedroom with all of Granddad's models. It was fun, looking at those architect's renditions of houses -- especially that one from Chautauqua. Nanny and Granddad never came up those stairs anymore, so they had us grandkids run errands for them up and down the steep steps. They had three twin beds up there -- perfect for their two sets of three grandchildren. Mom and Dad had us three, Uncle Ralph and Aunt Evone had their own three. Didn't all parents have three children back in the '60s?

Nanny put the standing rib roast in the oven. It'd take two hours. Mom and Dad were coming over with Gary and Jeff. The sequoia green Chevy Caprice was expected to pull into the split driveway any moment now. Gosh, how I miss those days and those three, long since dead. Grandma Adams died in '78, Granddad in '82, and then Nanny in '83. I remember the smells of Grandma Adams's pies, Nanny's roasts, the fire in the fireplace. Nanny had put the logs on the fire herself -- arthritic fingers and all. Granddad no longer knew how to do it.