Mongie

That's what we called our Grandma. My older sister Kerry made it up when she was a baby and since she was the first grandchild, it stuck for the rest of us. Who knows how she came up with it, but its unique just like Mongie.
She lived in this big old house, the most perfect house for a Grandma to live. It had a back staircase that lead from the kitchen upstairs, which was perfect for hiding and surprising people and a closet in a bedroom that had a shelf that fit 3 kids perfectly for a good game of hide and seek on Thanksgiving night. And her bedroom had an armoir filled with the most beautiful clothes and we could put on whatever we wanted to play dress up. She had boxes full of jewelry and she never pierced her ears so we could always wear her clip on earrings.
When she talked on the phone she would always take off one earring so she could hold the phone to her ear, I can still picture her holding the earring in her hand. She had a little tree in the back yard that someone nailed a some boards to so we could use them to climb up the tree and when we were little she had a weeping willow tree in her yard, which we all thought was pretty cool. It fell down in a storm or something because it has been gone for years.
She lived near a small lake called Avon Lake. Every time we went to her house she would pull all the bread heels out of the bag and we got to walk to Avon Lake and feed the ducks. And on the way she would say "Step on a crack, you break your mother's back" while we walked on the sidewalk so we would all jump over the cracks in the sidewalk.
She was tall and thin and beautiful. She was always dressed perfectly too.
We had a pool in our yard when we were little kids and I remember when she would come over to swim she wore a plastic swim cap with plastic flowers on it, so she wouldn't get her hair messed up.
She had the most beautiful handwriting.
And when she got a gift, no matter what it was, she would slowly open the wrapping so she could save it. She had a drawer in her dining room filled with "recycled" wrapping paper.
She would go to the store every Sunday after church to buy the newspaper and she would get Bazooka gum for us. Everyone fought over the cherry.
She loved music and parties, our town has a 4th of July parade and every year it went by her house so we would all go there in the morning to watch the parade from her front lawn.
She had Thanksgiving at her house every year, I still can't believe all of us fit. And for Christmas she would have brunch and every kid had a stocking that Santa made a special stop at her house to fill for us.

She had these sweet little things she would say like when she would hold your hand and if it was cold she'd say "Cold Hands, Warm Heart", when offered dessert, she would always request "just a sliver" of cake or pie, if we got to go home with her after church on Sunday, we would have to have "3 sups" of water before eating or drinking anything, guess that had something to do with having just had communion.

She always drank hot tea with milk and sugar which anyone who knows me, knows is my favorite drink. Even the sisters jokingly call me Mongie when I am cold and put on one of my cardigan sweaters and make a cup of tea.

When she got sick and we visited her at the hospital one Christmas, she didn't really recognize any of us. I was sitting next to her and she turned to me and said "You always had perfect hair, always" The sisters are still jealous of that one. And I had on a pair of shoes with colored sequences on them and when she saw them she said " I like those...those are me!"

She's gone now, Alzheimer's stole her mind and we lost her on November 24. I wore my sparkly sequence shoes to her funeral.