She made us Mother's Day breakfast (with Grandpa's help) 💕 . 🥓🍳🍞🍓 #monsterblog

via Instagram http://ift.tt/2rfpdss

Hilo (Great) Grandma

Dear Isabella,

You met my Hilo Grandma once, when you were a baby. She was already half way gone, and hardly recognized me or understood who you were. I wish you had known her the way I did. 

She taught me to sew. I can't quite remember her voice - it's just inches out of reach, it's been so long since I've really heard it - but I can easily conjure the rhythmic whirring of her Singer sewing machine set up on the patio between her house and Uncle's. I feel the heft of her serious fabric shears and hear its glide across the army green colored table as she cut out slinky fabrics that became the evening gowns she bippity-boppity-booped for the pageant winners who flocked to her house. 

I remember the shuffle of her slippers on the old brick paver walkway surrounding the family house. Lying luxuriously in bed on spring break - I slept in her bed between her and Grandpa when I stayed with them - I would hear her walk past the louvered windows hanging the laundry on the lines at the back of the house. "Hoy! You're still sleeping?" she scolded, but with a smile. 

She stocked the house with my favorite foods when I came to visit. ClassicCampbell's chicken noodle soup would be stacked under the sink and she made Portuguese sausage burned in the skillet, or Filipino chorizo in the big can. She would make corned beef hash cooked so long it was utterly dry, and mix it with hot rice and roll it into dumplings for me. Loaves and loaves of bread, toasting pair after pair of slices for my breakfast and buttering them generously all the way to the edges with Country Crock. After dinner I had all the ice cream cones and Swiss Miss I wanted. 

The next morning she would measure me for a dress and tell me how much smaller my waist should be. 

My grandma saved old Ziploc bags for reuse, bought meat on sale because it was cheap and froze it for years, folded and saved wrapping paper. She carried Ricola and strawberry hard candy in her purse and fed it to me to keep me quiet in church. Her most famous phrase was, "Hm! UP to you." Sometimes when I was little and she was younger, we would walk together to my Aunty Felipa's house a few blocks away. 

She gave me uncomfortable lectures about my body being my temple. She would bring me to her bedroom and painstakingly show me each piece of her extensive jewelry collection, telling me exactly what gem it was and the story behind her purchasing it or receiving it as a gift. She put four blankets on the bed in case I got cold - in the summer. She let me play with all her old-lady perfumes on her dresser. 

I had to bathe at 4 o'clock in the afternoon as if we were still on the plantation, and I was encouraged to put baby powder all over my skin afterwards. I was not allowed outside - even to sit on the lanai with shoes on - once I had bathed. 

My grandma often picked kalamansi from the tree in the driveway and squeezed the juice over my hands after I had been playing in the dirt, saying it was the same as washing. My hands would be sticky but I smelled of bright citrus. She would talk on the phone in Ilocano to her friends or our family and every so often I picked up my name and I knew she was talking about me. People were always dropping by the house for an unannounced visit or to give her papayas or bananas or lychee. 

Grandma's house was the heart of the family. Grandma was the matriarch. I was her golden girl and she loved me with ferocity. She died Friday, she's been gone a lot longer, and I miss her and I wish you had known her. 

Love,

Mommy