Anna: A Eulogy

So I'm 75 pages into the Odyssey. My grandma passed away last night, God rest her soul, and school has unsurprisingly lost all meaning. I am now unenthusiastic about everything save the long awaited trip home. The precious two weeks when I can be reunited with my comrades and continue on as if I'm not living my life away from them. As if there isn't this giant hole where they used to be.

Its hard to make friends here. Given that I have a personality as outgoing as a rock, given that everyone here has the inexplicable ability to bond at first sight, given that I don't want anyone to even try to replace the friends I have....after a month of being here, I'm still in the same clamshell I was sealed in for all of freshman year in high school. It was like this during my first year at Sacred Heart, too. Maybe this is a pattern in my life. Almost complete emotional and physical solitude for "The First Years."

I remember when I called my grandma "Mary Grandma," when she drove me to the library every Wednesday, when she was strong enough to work in her enormous, beautiful garden. I've never encountered a garden I like more that hers and Grandpa's. What they did to it was just amazing.

I remember when she taught me how to make "Wacky Cake" how she'd set out her boxful of spools and I'd build a spool civilization with spool people and spool cars and spool buildings. I remember her listening to the News Hour with Jim Leherer while hooking a rug. Her walking with my down Navajo to pick blackberries. Her making cinnamon rolls and biscuits for me in the mornings, me combing her hair with that green fine-toothed comb.

I remember Grandpa working in his wood shop in the garage, making toys for me. I remember the pond he built in th backyard, I remember the slides he'd show of lilies and birds. I remember the cards they'd send us. He'd draw the picture and grandma would write....I remember grandpa and I going to Richfield.....Grandma, Grandpa and I going to "the blue house in the woods" with the back bedroom that had that wonderful fish comforter. I remember the trips to Great Uncle Bill's Airfield, seeing the airplanes he restored, be pulled around the runway in a little red wagon.

I remember when I first met my oldest friend. I cleaned the horse stalls for him because I enjoyed it. I rode the horses sometimes. I had dinner with him and his wife, and its still routine to walk down the gravel lane and visit him and his new wife.

I realize that the happiest times of my childhood were here in Oregon. I wish I could go back to those days and relive them forever. Before my aunt took over my grandmother's house and all but remodeled it. Before people started dying. Before I grew up.

I think there is chronic depression in my family. I am always depressed. According to my mom, its normal in the Meyers line. I think I will spend the rest of my life looking back with nostalgia, never able to accept the change, never able to escape my shell and experience the world. Never able to be happy.