My grandmother’s name was Frances June Merritt, and she was the kind of woman who understood that the things you made with your hands were not separate from who you were.
She was the kind of woman who grew flowers not because she needed them but because she believed that something alive and beautiful in a garden was its own reason to exist. She kept a kitchen where everything had a place and the place mattered, where the cast iron hung in order of size on hooks she had installed herself in 1974, where the spice jars were labeled in her handwriting and organized alphabetically because she was that kind of person, precise and intentional about the things she cared for.
She made pancakes on Sunday mornings when I was there.
She made them the same way every time, with the same ceramic bowl and the same wooden spoon that was stained darker on one side from years of use, and she served them with the same blue plates that had a small chip on two of the rims but that she kept because they were the plates she had always had and the chips were part of their history.
The lake house was where she was most herself.
I want to say this clearly because it is the foundation of everything that comes after. Not the house in town, where she lived during the school year when she was teaching and then later during the winters when the cold bothered her more than it used to. The lake house, which she had bought with my grandfather before I was born and which had been the site of summers for the whole family for as long as anyone could remember, was the place where Frances June Merritt was fully herself.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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