Wise and Kind

She’d always had gleaming, bright-white hair. That’s how I remember her, anyway. I don’t remember, in all my life, her soft hair ever changing color. I know it did once, though, because in the hallway, next to and below the photos of Grandpa and their four children, is a picture of her in her early twenties, and her hair is dark. It is hard to tell because the photograph is black-and-white, same as Grandpa’s. All of the pictures on that wall were taken when the subject graduated from Calvin college, and every single one of them did. Even my dad, though he may have tried to tempt fate and go somewhere else, he switched into Calvin in the end, and finished there. And she did too. She met Grandpa there, and after they married they moved to into this house, the one that has these pictures in the hall. I imagine her in her twenties, carrying a bundle that is baby Peter, waving to the Olsens over the hedge as she and Grandpa walk up the sloping driveway that proved to be a wonderful roller-skating challenge for my dad and a nerve-wracking parallel-parking challenge for my mom. I can’t as easily picture Grandpa as young as he is in the photograph, but I try. I can see it in him, but I can’t picture the young guy he was, moving around and doing everyday things. It looks like a paper cut-out.

                  

But I suppose that’s what has awed me about her. She has never seemed to age. I paged through ancient photo-books with my mom on the night before we left, and I was startled to see her, though she was holding me as a tiny baby, looking just as I remembered her. I had grown from an embryo to a girl, and she who had looked wise and kind at the beginning looked just so in the end. She’d always been a petite woman. She spoke quietly and gently, only voicing what was necessary and leaving space for others to say what they desired. She existed by serving, she was a quiet presence that I wish I would have noticed more and thanked more freely. Memories of her are hard to place a finger on, because she was just there, one of the family playing games with us, a calm presence at meals. She cooked, though I don’t remember specifics; we went to many parks and museums and gardens with her and Grandpa, though I don’t know where, save for pictures. She was humble and quietly beautiful.

--granddaughter Audrey De Haan (in photo, 1998)