I received news that my last-surviving grandparent passed away yesterday. She was 95.
I haven’t seen her in the last 30 years. My last memory of her was when she took my sister & I out to the market to sell a basket of fruits that she harvested from her orchard one day; my parents had sent us to stay with my grandparents on their farm during the final days of the war. It was dangerous and chaotic time when the communists were launching the offensives that eventually overtook southern Vietnam.
When I was little, our family usually celebrated the new year by visiting my grandparents for a few days. It was always a treat to visit a small village and stay on a farm for a city boy like me. My grandparents’ place is by a river and has all sorts of fruit trees and farm animals. The best thing was eating all the home-grown fruits. Jack fruits being my favorite. I loved wandering among the trees and sometime I’d work up the guts and go all the way to end of their orchard and check out the people working in the adjacent rice paddies. I never stayed there too long for fear of getting lost– the place seemed huge to me.
Each new year, my grandmother would bake up all sorts of bake goods for the celebration. I do remember fondly of her ginger cookies. She was constantly busy. I’d jump at the opportunity of helping her feeding the chickens and the pigs. I remember one time, she chopped down this young banana tree and sliced up the entire tree and cook it as part of porridge for the pigs. She’d sometimes reward me with a fresh egg. She’d drop it into a glass of hot water and voila, hard-boiled egg.
My grandmother was a small and skinny woman. She was surprisingly resilient though– remaining strong even in her later years, my Dad told me. She stayed all her life in the same village: born and died there. The hard life she lived showed through on her rough hands and hardened face.
I regret that my daughters never got a chance to meet any of their great-grandparents when they were alive. I guess they’ll have to learn about their great-grandmother through the stories I will be telling them.
Goodbye Grandma…
