So many of my Christmas memories are inexorably bound to my grandmother’s house. The primary place my family celebrated the holiday was there, along with dozens of aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. The dinner and gift exchange were always the centerpiece, but there are all of the other bits of it, like the stack of red and green Christmas records queued up in the large console stereo on one side of the living room, next to the artificial tree. That tree, with all of its tinsel and ornaments, will always be the standard to which I hold every tree through the years. Being allowed to help decorate it was a rite of passage, though I expect my Grandmother was always glad for the help.
The home held other meaning for me as well, later in life. When my parents divorced, and both were trying to figure out the split, I lived with my grandparents for several years — at least part time. If you can imagine me at age 11, you get an idea how much my grandmother deserves a nomination for sainthood.
Norma Lee Pike. An extremely loving and caring woman. She had that mix of Southern matriarch and sassy overseer that makes every Texan grandmother a force of nature. She knew where her line was, and held to it firmly… though she made hundreds of allowances for a teenager who was still trying to figure out his way in the world.
She gave me the very first side-eye I remember receiving. I’m sure it was a joke or comment that was encroaching on the boundaries of good taste, but I was chastised appropriately.
After my grandfather, Sam, died in the early Nineties, she moved out to Waxahachie. And by moved, I mean the house came with her. When you’re inside, you still have all of the tactile memories you accrue in a decades-old house, but once you look outside the window, or step onto the porch, the illusion is gone. The old auto body shop, that the Pikes managed for decades, isn’t up the hill. The above-ground pool isn’t down the path to the left anymore.
And now, neither is she.
I don’t know how to process her death.
She’s been in failing health for several years, and absolutely deserves her rest. At age 94, she absolutely lived a full and bountiful life. Her legacy is one of love, and service to her community, and family — first and foremost.
The last Christmas we spent together in 2012, before she moved into a care facility, the family was trying to get dinner prepared and set. Grandmother refused to let us do everything, continually working in the kitchen to make sure we were all right.
She was an amazing woman, and I’m not doing her justice. She’d tut at me, were she here, and tell me she already knows how much I’ll miss her. She’d also scold me for knowing Christmas will not be the same, in my mind, for quite some time.
Goodnight, Grandmother.
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