This is about my mom's mom. She's 88, to turn 89 in June. She's manic. I don't mean that in any sort of derogatory sense. She's bipolar, and right now she's manic. We were able to hold off at her worst, because we were ill... pretty good timing, as then she didn't upset the girls. However, she's on heavier meds, and she's LESS manic.

Tonight we went over to celebrate Mother's Day... I had warned my kids that she might not be the "Piney" we knew. I was right, she was better. She had so many stories to tell, about history, about her mom, the suffragette, about her childhood, and her sister, and her children, and the people she knew. I held on to every story, and will try to do them justice until she writes them down herself.

The story of her mom, the suffragette, in the store of her husband is one I've posted before. She retold that one.

She told us of her dancing and performing through high school with her sister, Betty Jo - aka Elizabeth, or Betts, (Sexton) Barry. She told of how they performed through their days at Purdue University, where my grandmother received a Bachelor of SCIENCE in Home Economics. This was strangely rare in her day.

She told me of being pregnant with a husband in the war (WW2), and giving birth alone. She told me about walking down the street in Indiana with her two year old - having given birth with her husband away, and bumping into her old college friend, Barbara (then Blaker) and HER then two year old, Karma (born in Karma, Nicaragua). The two reconnected, and only death (recently of Barbara) parted them.

She told Phoebe of how they used to wash clothes - with an agitator in a big soapy barrel washer, and then through a ringer - with two cylinders squeezing the liquid out of the clothes, and then to a barrel of clean water, then back through the ringer, then to be hung on a clothes line to dry. Far fewer carbon emissions in that day, let me tell you.

I'll keep thinking on these stories, she had so many, and talked so fast... We're hoping she'll put some of them down into the computer so that we can put them together.