Maxine

Our good friend taught her granddaughter that once the cookies are in the oven, you turn up the music on the radio and dance.

And they do!

So forever and forever, that child will remember her grandmother dancing in a toasty, sweet smelling kitchen, holding a dish towel.  Maybe she will even pass it on to HER grandchildren!

And I started thinking about my own grandmother, and what she left me.    She was a woman of her time: severe, practical, and not overly fond of children.  Baking, for her, was all business, and the results were never delightful, merely serviceable.  There were no tea parties at her house, no whispered secrets, no dancing in the kitchen waiting for cookies to bake.

She lived until I was in my 50’s, the matriarch of a disjoint and rambunctious family that little reflected the order she tried to impose upon us.  She wore pants long before it was seemly for ladies, and Chanel No. 5, which still evokes in me a sense of substance and security.

When she died, her daughters dug through boxes of memorabilia and stacks of ancient snapshots: long dead dogs and children gone agèd.  Maxine was there often, sharp, stern and forbidding.  But they also found one tiny and contrived strip of pictures as she mugged for the camera in some photo booth long ago, 1930?  Her hair was short and asymmetrical, with one long curve swinging out past her thin young face, a budding flapper?  The mischievous smile was definitely not status quo.  No other picture ever caught that smile. 

Hanging in her bedroom, was a print, delicate and vibrant, a saucy impressionist girl casually tossing her head and smiling broadly at an unseen admirer; completely incongruous in my grandparent’s spare, useful house.  And I wonder if somewhere in her soul, that girl and the flapper were both Maxine.  I hope so.