Grandma and Grandpa

I am sorry I never got into The Golden Girls the way you did but now I totally understand why you liked it, but did you relate more to Rose, the silly Minnesotan or Blanche, the slutty one? I knew you were a seamstress, you could make my jeans tight around my teenage ankles, sew me a scratchy robe, craft Advent calendars, did you ever try to teach me how to use a sewing machine? Did you think I would not succeed, alterations, strawberry pincushions, thimble collections? You had seven children, one daughter toward the end but a twin to a boy, dinner came in cans, your husband, my grandfather, the father of my dad, a good joke-teller, a snorer, dead at 52 in Oshkosh at a convention you could not attend, you still had two teenagers. We found hundreds of romance novels under your bed after you died, Harlequins in dusty boxes. I was not even born yet but I know him, your husband, in my dad, his laugh, a fishing trip in Canada they took, just father and son, my dad keeps a photograph of that weekend, him and his dad in a canoe at the Boundary Waters, life vests tightly tied around their bodies.