You can't wear a white T-shirt to eat spaghetti

My grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary is coming up in April, and my mom is putting together some sort of memory book for them, for which I have to write a couple of essays about them. I haven't seen my grandfather for 7 years and my grandmother for 4, so I thought I would brainstorm a bit here, see if I can dig out any really good memories and maybe get a bit of the flotsam (and Jetsam, my pet eels) out of the way.

I don't have a vast store of memories about my grandparents because they live two days' drive from my hometown, so we saw them once, or at most twice, a year. The major visit came in the summer, usually in August, when my mother would lose her mind and pile the four of us kids into the family van, wave good-bye to my father, and head west. We went for two weeks, and certain things always happened while we were there. Grandma always took us shopping in Walla Walla, Washington. Grandpa always disappeared with my brother, doing "guy" things for hours on end. Mom and Grandma canned peaches, applesauce, and jam. My cousins Kristy Lynne and Stacy came to visit in the second week of our stay—this always inspired a great deal of high emotion: first a flurry of joy and mad playfulness, then eventually anger and yelling and misbehavior. To this day I don't get along well with Kristy, who my grandmother calls "Krissy" and refuses to hear a word against. Incomprehensible. We were always reluctant to go home again.

My grandfather is a giant of a man, even though his legs were amputated just below the knee before I was born. Until the year after I graduated from high school, he spent hours on end chopping wood, hunting elk, and helping my great-uncle Phil farm his land near La Grande. My grandmother is short, shorter than my mother, with bad bunions and ingrown toenails and fluffy hair that spent an unfortunate amount of my childhood dyed an unbelievable black. My grandmother always smelled good, despite the fact that she smokes. She smells like lilac lotion and the perfume she has worn as long as I can remember, and the skin of her arms and cheeks is soft. I used to pet her.

Okay, all of this has made me nostalgic, but at least I have some ideas for writing. Maybe tomorrow I will cover the scandal that pervades the maternal side of my family. Maybe not. Depends on how lucky you are.