Circus Peanuts and Aspirin Bottles

Greetings to all!

I have two persistent memories of my grandmother. One is that she loved circus peanuts. She would keep a plastic bag in the bottom drawer of her desk and she would pull a few of those wonderful spongy things out at a time. I remember that my family would chuckle at her because, to be fair, they looked ridiculous, all dimply and orange and all. And they seemingly had no redeeming social values other than they were her snack.

The second memory is the little bottles of water she always kept in her purse. I know now that she was way ahead of her time - she was carrying water bottles a full 30 years before they became a fashion accessory. My grandmother would fill empty aspirin bottles with water and carry them with her on car trips in case she got thirsty. Sometimes she would share a tiny sip with us, other times, I would see her just take a little drink.

So what do circus peanuts and aspirin bottles have to do with my Sarah Hightower? One of the qualities that I always needed Sarah to have was total self-reliance. Even though my grandmother needed a great deal of support during her lifetime, in these two key instances, she displayed such remarkable independence and such a sense of how she was able to get the simplest things that she needed. If she needed a snack, she opened a drawer and if she needed a sip of water, she pulled a bottle out of her purse. I like that. I saw through the superficial silliness of recycling an aspirin bottle for car trips or stashing sticky sweets and saw a woman who was just getting what she needed. And even though she never owned a car or a home of her own and she never traveled the world or ran for office, she did, on this small level, just get the job done.

I really liked that.

Sincerely,
Nilesite