Should be blog-free for the next couple of weeks as we take off for Toronto and then as soon as we come back I'm off to Maui for Scott's wedding. But it won't be any different from the last couple of blog-free weeks, which were caused by nothing other than sheer laziness. It's the summer, whaddaya want?



A week ago Saturday, Grandma Bartlett died, so I did want to go on about that a bit. She was 92, and still looked to be in decent shape when we saw her in June, although she was about as thin as she'd ever been and not too mobile, but still could carry on a conversation and got out of the house for one thing or another. As a grandmother, she always was in the shadow of Grandma Pearce to us, since we spent a lot more time with the latter and she was a lot more hands-on than Grandma B ever was. But you could talk to her, she wasn't unapproachable or anything, and unlike Grandpa Bartlett you could understand what she was saying. Some of my cousins had non-Bartlett grandparents who were even less cuddly, so by comparison Grandma B came out ahead and was probably closer to them.



When I was seven and Jill was four we stayed at the grandparent Bartlett's house while mom was in the hospital to have a baby. For some reason there had been some lobbying by somebody to have us stay there rather than at Grandma P's (haven't gotten to 1970 in the diaries yet, so don't know why for sure). At the very least it may have simply been that their house was much handier to the hospital for Dad. It wasn't a very big house, and Grandma Dodds was still around then, too, so I was sleeping on the couch in the living room (which I think is basically where Dad slept growing up), don't know where Jill was. Couldn't sleep at all, then the call came during the night that Mom had had a miscarriage, and I laid there awake while from five feet away Grandma B called some of the relatives to tell them the news. It seemed like the middle of the night, but it may just've been late in the evening.



Much has also been made in recent years of that same stay, I think, when I took a walk around the neighborhood and got lost. Grandpa B liked to go on walks around the area, I may have even gone with him, and since the streets in that part of town were basically a grid I soon got the hang of it and set out on my own, each one a little longer than the last, until one time I got to a street that didn't meet up the right way and got turned around and that was it. I had the presence of mind to knock on somebody's door, and both grandparents and probably Donna came to rescue me in the car. Don't know why this story has become folklore, other than the fact that it used to be okay to let a seven-year old roam the neighborhood, plus Mom can't get over that I sought out help and didn't just crawl into a hole somewhere.



So Grandma Bartlett's passing signals the end of an era, although there wasn't much of that era to begin with. Dad would've said she was the last of the Mohicans, and only in the last few months did she start to come up with some new stories from the old days, as unlike Grandma P she was never one to talk about family history much.