My grandma would have turned 100 today. I started with a nice little Facebook post, but that post turned into a love letter and I decided 100 years of influence deserved a full blog.

I’ll start with the external. My grandma was beautiful. Always was. She was always so put together. I picked up on two pieces of beauty advice from her. 1. Never miss a hair appointment and 2. Avon has everything you will ever need to make yourself look good. Grandma had a wonderful head of hair, and it still looked good until she died at age 95. I regularly send a thank you up to her for blessing me with the thick hair gene. I order Avon every few months and the only hair appointment I remember missing was because of a throbbing migraine.

Grandma kept me while my mom worked before I started kindergarten. We watched a lot of tv, but every day we read lots of books. Beyond reading to me, I didn’t see her read many books, but she was well read. She read at least one newspaper every day, plus lots of farm publications, Reader’s Digest, Guideposts, TV Guide, and others. She was highly intelligent. I marveled at how quickly she could solve the puzzle when we would watch Wheel of Fortune. One of my earliest memories was watching Princess Diana’s wedding with her.

I miss Grandma’s food so much. She doctored up Kraft macaroni and cheese to gourmet level, made the best pancakes I’ve ever tasted, and fried potatoes that I crave. Nothing fancy, but always wonderful. The key lessons – put a little more sugar in it, salt it more, do not buy low fat anything (especially mayonnaise, sour cream, or salad dressing) and margarine is not fit to eat.

Beyond cooking food, Grandma could also grow food. Asparagus, strawberries, and tomatoes were her specialty. I try so hard to emulate her green thumb, but I just haven’t.

Grandma had a big heart for animals. Maybe too big of one for cats. Especially stray cats. We used to make fun of her, but her attitude was that God put this animals in her care, and she ignored our ribbing about it.

Internally, Grandma’s faith was deep. She didn’t miss church, and she had a specific pew at First Christian in Carmen, OK. I thought it was particularly precious that she was her preacher’s Sunday School teacher.

She didn’t talk a lot about her faith with me, but I learned a lot from her actions. Her sweet, gentle demeanor were always a calming presence. She didn’t speak poorly of others. She loved her family fiercely. She had a respect for her country and its leaders that I have always appreciated. I remember one day I was making fun of our president, and she pointed out, in her gentle way, that I wasn’t very well educated on the subject and even if I didn’t agree, the president still deserved our support. I try to repeat that often.

I miss my grandma so much and have an urge to call her on a regular basis. I miss her pancakes. More than anything I miss that calm support that I knew was always there. If she were here she wouldn’t want us to make a fuss about her 100th birthday. She would probably be irritated with me for putting this on the internet. But the lessons she instilled in us were so important and I just couldn’t let the day pass by without saying happy birthday 💗