#MeetMyGrandma

#MeetMyGrandma

#MeetMyGrandma by Ellen H. Bahr

For most of my friends, memories of their grandmothers are synonymous with homemade cookies and lace doilies. Memories of my grandmother are of silk kimonos and tatami mats, rice balls and sushi. My best friend grew up living next door to her grandmother, but I lived 6,000 miles away from mine. Visiting her requires a passport and a flight over the Pacific Ocean. But my memories of her are still sweet. Meet my grandma, Kameno Yube Takeda, an extraordinary woman living an ordinary life in Shimanto, Japan.

She was born the sixth of seven children in a remote village on the island of Shikoku in southern Japan. When I say 'remote', I mean that in 1913, the year of her birth, there were no railroads connecting her village to the rest of Japan—in fact, there were no roads of any kind. People traveled by foot and only the richest townspeople owned bicycles. Most people on her island were either farmers or fishermen. Her father was a rice farmer, so though they were poor, they always had enough to eat.

Her marriage to my grandfather, Masaru Takeda, was an arranged one. Together they had five children and were married for over sixty years. She never knew a day without work. If she wasn't laboring in the rice fields (quite literally—she nearly gave birth to my uncle Hiroki in a rice paddy), she was working at the sento, the traditional public bathhouse their family owned. Many nights she would stay until one in the morning, scrubbing the tiles of the bath and cleaning up after late night customers.

Grandma turned 101 this year and she's still going strong. She's tiny—my ten-year-old daughter was taller than her—and tips the scales at about 90 pounds, but her appetite would surprise you. At our family reunion dinner, she ate so much sushi, tempura, fish, crab, and fruit that my aunt had to remove her from the table and put her to bed. Once we brought her a pack of Lifesavers and she put the entire pack in her mouth all at once. She looked like a chipmunk, and said, “How tasty!” over and over. That funny story is a favorite of my children, who love to imagine their Japanese great-grandma stuffing her face with American Lifesavers.

My grandma sewed her own kimonos. She still wears fancy rings on her knobby fingers. She loves tending her flowers. She spends hours each day looking after the ones in pots outside her bedroom window. That is what I found her doing the last time I visited her, two years ago. I sat down beside her and said, “Hello, Grandma. It's good to see you.” She looked at me, smiled and said, “Who are you?” I told her I was Ellen, her granddaughter from America come to visit. She said, “I'm so glad you are here.”

“Me, too, Grandma. I'm so glad I am here, too.”

An hour later after breakfast I went out to talk with her again.

She looked at me, smiled, and asked, “Who are you?”

We had this conversation several times a day. Her memory has gone, but each time she saw me, there was a sparkle in her eye and a warmth in her smile. She was genuinely happy to see me over and over again. It's rather nice to have someone pleased to see you after an absence of only a few minutes. I wish I could visit her more, but distance makes it difficult. I've only been to her village four times in my life. I know that really isn't enough to get to know your grandma very well. After my mother came to America and married my father, my grandmother could never come visit us. She never even traveled away from her island of Shikoku, or far from the small village in which she was born. She lead a simple life of hard work, raising five children and putting food on the table. But sometimes that's enough. Four visits really isn't enough to make a lot of memories with my grandma, but it is enough to come to love her. And you would, too, if you could meet her.