Remembering my Nana.

My Nana died today.

But really, she died a long time ago. My grandmother had Alzheimer’s disease, that cruel thief that steals memories, relationships and, eventually, an entire life. I last saw my Nana in 1997, just before I moved to California. I’m not sure when she last saw me, because by that time, she didn’t know who I was. My husband, whose sharp-as-a-tack grandmother died unexpectedly a few years ago, has given me hugs and much sympathy today, but my grief is set at mere sadness, because I had already lost my grandmother.

My Nana, who shunned her first name, Clara, in favor of her middle name, Esther, was my country grandma, as opposed to my Grammie, who was a city gal all the way. My Nana had four children, and raised them on her own after my grandfather’s sudden death in the early 1960s. She chopped wood and baked bread and often kept her home warm in Maine’s harsh winters with nothing more than a woodstove in the kitchen and a heated brick in her bed. She had high heels and purses and costume jewelry and perfume and lipstick for her grandchildren to play with, driving my mother, her one-time daughter-in-law, crazy with the latter, which I would bring home from sleepovers.

Nana had a delightful Maine accent that I occasionally replicate for the amusement of friends and family. She said things like “scotched” instead of “scorched” and “Vir-gin-ee-uh” instead of “Virginia.” She made wonderful Anadama bread, which I have yet to successfully replicate, and always reused her tea bags. She was the definition of Yankee thrift, keeping balls of string culled from the butcher, as well as every school paper her children ever produced.

In fact, the entire unheated upstairs of her home was like a museum to my father, aunts and uncle, and provided wonderful opportunities for my cousins and me to play and imagine. The stairs we climbed to get there were the “temporary” stairs she and her husband put up as they built their home decades earlier; it had a closet underneath it, and we could “spy” from below. In the basement, with its dirt floor and dusty windows, she had an old wringer washer, and jars of food that she grew, picked and – to my youthful horror – pickled.

Her house sat on a fair amount of land, although it was never entirely clear to me where her property began and ended. I loved going down the hill via several paths into the woods and ending just before the Kenduskeag Stream, which provided a peaceful backdrop amid my sometimes chaotic childhood. She kept the one-room cabin she and her husband had first built before choosing a higher spot for their home, and we’d walk down there, usually accompanied by the intrepid German shepherd, Sadie, who lived the life of a country dog, getting sprayed by skunks and once learning the hard way that porcupines aren’t toys.

As one granddaughter after another arrived, with just one boy until much later, she became flustered in disciplining us. Her scolding came out as “Emily-Amy-Jenny-Missy-Molly…” until she eventually landed on the right name. I remember her Bible, with its four colored ribbons as bookmarks, and the way she made notes in the margins in her neat script; she was a Christian in thought and action.

She wasn’t perfect, of course. I remember her one swear word – “sugar-t*t,” an old-school term for pacifier – which now seems more profane than the word she was subbing it for, but she strove for a life of goodness. Nana was old-school too, from her 8-track tapes to her tightly-permed hairdo, but there was a subtle strength about her, a way she kept the family together. Alzheimer’s disease stole her memories and stole her from us, but in our memories, she will always keep our family together.

(My mother took the photo; the pictures of my childhood make it appear that I grew up on the set of the “Batman” TV show.)