Memories of My Grandma B.

Grandma would always say hello to me with a firm kiss on the cheek. I remember her smell and the soft, papery feel of her skin against my face as she would do so. I loved the beautiful, high-collared, ruffly blouses she wore to church on Sundays, with a little round Relief Society pin on her lapel. My grandpa had given her a bottle of perfume long ago that came in a blue and green parrot-shaped textured glass bottle. Long after the perfume was gone, Grandma kept the empty bottle on her dresser as a remembrance of his gift to her. She treasured special gifts, like the sweatshirt we gave her when I was probably eight or nine with all her grandkids’ hand prints on it. I saw her wear it as recently as last summer.
When I was a kid, Grandma worked as a lunch lady at the old Granger Elementary in Granite School District. My elementary school was in the same district, and I thought it was so cool that she always knew what I would be having for lunch. I loved the childhood treats Grandma would make for us kids. Her pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and her zucchini brownies were my favorites.
I remember the taste of the water from the tin cups Grandma would give me to drink when I was little. We used to sit at her kitchen table and play with an enormous can of buttons of every shape and size. She would help my sister, Emily, and me to lace them on to needle and thread to be worn as crowns and necklaces. I would help her do dishes in her kitchen sink wearing a dishtowel for an apron. She taught me to knead bread dough and, if I was at her house on her baking day, she would sometimes let me bake my own little loaf of bread. I loved the smell of baking bread at her house!
My interest in sewing came from Grandma. As a child, she taught me to tie quilts. Grandma made us quilts to celebrate momentous occasions. She gave me one when I graduated from high school, and another when Jon and I were married. She made one for each of our babies when they were born. The boys still love their Great-Grandma quilts, and asked to sleep with them the night that she passed away.
When we were young, my siblings and I loved to go to Grandma’s house to play because she had such a great backyard. It was enormous, full of places to explore like tool sheds, a green house, and other farm-ish things, and it had the best climbing trees I knew of. There was one tree in particular, a cherry tree, that I loved to climb because about ten feet up there was the perfect little spot where the branches made a kind of a cradle just right for sitting in. When Grandma found me up there she would yell for me to come down. We kids would also sometimes climb up onto the roof of the sheds and hide in the branches of overhanging trees. Grandma didn’t like that, either, and she would send Grandpa to get after us. I think she worried we would fall and break something, but we never did.
My family would go over to Grandma’s house in the summer to help with her enormous vegetable gardens. Sometimes we would get to walk up the long road with her to turn on the irrigation water. As kids, we loved to play in the irrigation ditch in front of her house and catch water skeeters there. When it would get too hot, Grandma would fill up her old wash tub with water as a swimming pool for us kids or she would improvise a slip ‘n’ slide with a big plastic sheet and a garden hose. I remember pulling big, fat carrots out of the ground, picking and shelling peas, shucking corn, and snapping green beans. Grandma also loved to bottle fruits and veggies for us, and when I left home for college, it was with a pallet of bottled pears, green beans, and spaghetti sauce.
Grandma would come over to our house on our birthdays for cake and ice cream every year, and on Christmas afternoons to admire our spoils. We loved to trick-or-treat to her house on Halloween because she didn’t get many trick-or-treaters since she lived on such a busy street. She made me feel so special; I knew I was really important to her. I remember her attending my dance recitals, concerts, graduations, and other performances. She was always so supportive. She loved being together as a family and we always had a big Sorenson Family Reunion every year. She had my mom write a song about our “wonderful Sorenson Family tree” that I’m sure none of us will ever forget.
As I have grown into an adult, Grandma has still worked so hard at keeping our family united. She would have us over monthly to celebrate those family members who had had a birthday that month. She would work for a full week sometimes on the meal preparation for these special get-togethers, preparing a little part of it each day. We enjoyed picnics and barbecues in her backyard with chairs gathered into a circle for visiting on the back lawn.
When Jon and I moved from Sandy to Taylorsville, Grandma was excited that we were so nearby. She loved it when we would come in to see her at Reams where she worked in the deli. She would always give Hyrum and Andrew free ice cream cones while we would visit. Grandma would also come over to our house to help me with the boys when I was pregnant with Caleb and when he was a newborn. I remember she wanted to be truly helpful to me, and she would iron and do dishes and anything else she could think of to simplify my work. She notice once while washing our dishes that we were making do with a scarce amount of handed-down, mismatched silverware. That Christmas, she thoughtfully gave us a set of silverware as a gift.
When I was pregnant with Samuel, Grandma was hungry for time to get to know her great-grandsons better, as she had the opportunity to tend her great-granddaughters regularly each week. So she began to tend them for me whenever I would go to my monthly and later, weekly, doctors visits. By so doing, she developed a strong and sweet bond with my oldest three boys. Somewhere along the line she started to make up treasure hunts for them, and would draw maps of her house and yard for them to follow until they found the treasure, usually a baggie of their favorite candy corns.
Grandma taught Jon and me all about gardening this past summer. She loved gardening; she told me once that it was her therapy. Last summer, she decided she only had the energy to use half of her gardening space, and offered the other half to our family. She taught us to us a hoe and how to make furrows, and how to plant our veggies. While Jon and I would be out working in the garden, she would pop a big bowl of buttery popcorn for our kids to enjoy while she entertained them indoors. (The boys loved her popped corn so much that she even gave us a hot air popper of our own for Christmas.)
Just after we had gotten the garden planted last spring, Jon and I found out we were expecting our fifth son, Enoch. With me being pregnant, there were times when I was not feeling well enough, or we were too busy to come and take care of our garden. Sweet Grandma was so generous with her time and help. One day, toward the end of the summer, she called on the phone and offered to pick that week’s ripe tomatoes for us since she would already be out picking her own. There was no refusing her! After she had picked them and brought them in, she called again and asked if she could make them into spaghetti sauce for us, and would we use it if she did. (Some of that batch of spaghetti sauce was on the pasta we ate the day she passed away.)
Last summer Grandma and I got to sit and visit often while we were over to garden. One of these times was after she had been in the temple over the weekend with her sisters. We had a wonderful conversation about sisterhood, and motherhood. I always have admired my grandma for her relationship with and love for her sisters. She was also a great example of frequent temple attendance and missionary work. I loved, too, that she would relate with me about the trials of young motherhood with lots of little kids running around. In recent years I have felt that the difference in our ages actually didn’t make us that different. I could relate to her and she to me. She was not just my grandma, but also my friend and counselor.