Wednesday, October 4, 2017
It's impossible to express how much I will miss her. We spent many, many happy hours together talking about things, especially family history, or working on projects together, or even playing a little bocce. She frequently helped me get myself out of one sewing muddle or another. When I was 15 and butting heads with my dad so hard the house shook, Gram took me in and let me be me. She taught me the value of hard work and how important it is to volunteer time and labour to organizations or causes I believe it. She made delicious candy and excellent cinnamon toast. When we were little she would dice an orange and sprinkle a little sugar on it; no matter how hard I try, I can never replicate how good it was when she made it. She was a passionate reader, devouring several novels a week, especially romance novels.
She was born into a Francophone family in Saskatchewan and had to suddenly become Anglophone when she was eight and they moved to the now-ghost town of Lumberton, BC. Though there was no trace of a French accent in her speech, she would adorably mix up the personal pronouns for the animals, with the males being "she" and the females being "he." Every once in a while, tuna would be "thon."
She had magnificent, capable hands with broad palms and long fingers. Her nails were always beautifully kept.
She loved to laugh and dance. Painting was as much a part of her as breathing and she painted right up until she died. She was a gifted self-taught artist and I have always wondered what she could have accomplished had she had some formal training. When I was a kid she made me a complete set of Star Trek paper dolls and I spent many happy hours dressing and undressing Spock. She sewed clothes for me when I was little, helped sew my high school grad dress, made more than 100 linen napkins with my Mom for my wedding, and sewed my favourite winter coat.
Some of my favourite memories of Gram include a road trip we made together to the coast, riding dune buggies with her through the top field, quilting with her at Fort Steele, and making swords and armour with her for the play Pippin.
When I was living with her as a teen she gave me this advice, apropos of nothing: "Remember, Sioux, never make love to a man with sticky hands." Which is sound advice, though one wonders where that wisdom came from.
In recent weeks she had received many 100th birthday cards from people, which gave her a great deal of joy.
-- Sioux Browning
