She wore hot pink
She looks like a movie star in the wedding photo that now sits on my bureau instead of hers. She rode a cross-country train to marry a man she hadn't seen in a year but who had written her a letter every single day they'd been apart. After the wedding, she drove to Mexico to smuggle back gas for the car they had borrowed. She gave birth to her first son the same day she got a telegram saying her husband was missing in action after being shot down over Germany. Wearing a dress and an apron, she helped build the house she'd live in for the next 60 years. She'd been known to drive a milk truck to church while wearing a mink coat. In her wallet, she still carried an essay one of her sons wrote in eighth grade about how she was the best mother in the world. She kept every letter and card and bill she'd every received (cancelled checks from 1949, thank you notes from her grandchildren, wedding invitations and, of course, that telegram), all neatly organized. She made sure her children got good educations and never felt poor. She knew how to stretch a dollar, could work miracles with coupons and loved getting a good deal. She made sure her grandchildren knew their motorcycle-driving, sprint car-racing, house-building grandfather, who miraculously survived being shot down over Germany twice but died of cancer before they were born, almost as well as if he'd still been alive. She could be a tough critic and always spoke her mind but you could still tell how much she loved you, how proud she was of all her family. She was always fashionable, always glamorous. Not even her long illness could take that away from her. She was fiesty and independent and, above all, courageous. She lived life to the fullest. She wore hot pink to her own funeral. Good-bye, Gram. I hope I've inherited your courage and strength.