The Red Dress Club: Affection

I never knocked on her door.  She gave me my own key when I was 13 so I was used to letting myself in.  Now I was 20 and using my lunch hour to sit and visit.

"Grandma?  Are you here?"

"In the kitchen, sissie," she answered.

I took my lunch and sat at her kitchen table. 

I loved that table.  She served her offspring, all of their offspring and some of their offspring at the table every Saturday morning.  Scratch that.  Breakfast started at that table, but we were too numerous to fit there now.  Instead, it served as a buffet--for food, conversation and reassurance.

That's what I needed that day--reassurance.  Grandma knew I had recently broken up with my boyfriend and I was pretty positive he had been "the one."  Sometimes you're just completely and totally wrong.  This had been one of those times for me.  It was especially frustrating because I was so sure I was right.  That, and my cousin was getting married.  I thought my life had been heading the same direction.  Again, wrong, wrong, so totally wrong.

Two weeks earlier, I had that conversation with Grandma.

"Do you think this will ever happen for me?  I was just so sure that he was it."

"You'll get there," she commented.  "Do you want me to make you something else to eat?"  Grandma was positive that a little bit of bacon grease and gravy could cover a multitude of wrongs in a person's life.  At any rate, it always made me laugh.

"No, thanks," I giggled.  "Sometimes I just wonder how you know when it's right."

"You'll know, sissie.  You'll know.  Now, I made a pie the other day and we'll both have a piece."

Her love language was food.  But that table held so much more than calories.  And that Saturday, when I let myself in, my Grandma showed me a whole lot more than fat grams.  In fact, I didn't even make it to her kitchen table before she met me in the hall.

"I have something to show you," she smiled.  At 4'10", my Grandma could smile and it would seem like her whole body smiled with her.

I followed her into the formal dining room, and she showed me two boxes.

"There.  I bought a set of pots and pans for little sissie's wedding.  The second one is for you when you get married."

I wasn't even dating anyone.  But that simple statement showed me that my Grandma really believed love was out there for me.

She was right.  A year and a half later, I showed her my wedding ring.  She didn't make it to my wedding, because she passed away just after I was engaged.

But when I walked down the aisle, I remembered that set of pots and pans and the fact that my Grandma purchased them almost three years before I ever became a Mrs.

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This week's prompt was about affection. We asked you to write how the show of affection played a part in your memory.


You were to choose a time when either the abundance or lack of affection and take us to that moment.