Since my grandfather divorced and remarried before I was born and my grandmother never remarried (well, neither Nellie or Billie did - Nellie's husband died a long time before I was born), I've always had three grandmothers and one grandfather.

 My nanny, Nellie, was my only stereotypical grandmother. She gave me candy if I behaved in church, bought me new clothes from J.C. Penney's (even though she always called it "Belk-Tyler's"), played piano, and had chocolate hidden in her house for me. She wore floral dresses and sweatshirts with her church's logo on them, and the worst word I ever heard her say was "shoot," on a day she fell into our television set while trying to walk, again, without her walker.

She loved Jesus, but she never talked about it, even though she went to church twice a week. She always told me it was good to go to church, but never said much beyond that. Now that she's gone, I have her Bible in my bedroom, and when I flip through the pages, it's obvious how serious she was about her religion. On the very first page, in her cursive handwriting, is a note that says, "You never have an experience in life that doesn't draw you closer to God, or cause you to get further from God." Is this how she saw the world all those years?

 She lived, until her Alzheimer's took too much, in West Virginia, in a big white house that smelled like old carpet and popsicle sticks. A house that was filled with puns - a quarter next to a tiny wooden hammer with the words "quarter pounder" written in sharpie, a photo she kept in her wallet of her "pride and joy" - two bottles of house-cleaning products, and a plaque that says "I'm always high, I live in the mountains."

 Billie, another grandmother, is the one who smokes two packs a day - Tahoes - and never learned how to drive. She says "goddamn" more than any person I've ever met, decided she was going to raise a child when she was in her late 60s, writes poetry, loves Obama, and does homework with my little nephew every school day. She was the oldest of a bunch of siblings and the child of parents who died too young. Because of that, she became a mother before she became a high school graduate. She's the queen of "when I was your age" stories, and even though she was probably perpetually hungry growing up, she never makes us eat food we don't like or have room for. (Just save it for the dogs; you don't have to eat it.)

 She's my mother's mother and nearly every day, they sit in Billie's apartment and flip through medical books, talk about their symptoms, and diagnose each other with illnesses - all while chain-smoking.

She grew up in Washington DC and Maryland, and I can still hear the north in her voice when she talks. If I write the word "water" how she says it, it becomes Wort-er.

She is a poet, but she doesn't like poems that rhyme. And she often speaks like a good poem, pointing out the beauty in having your own jar of peanut butter no one will ever put a jelly knife in. 


My last grandmother is the one my grandfather married thirty years ago, Utku, who speaks with a Turkish accent. Utku loves books, and she loves to travel. She's been more places than anyone I know; she's been all over the world and all over America. She loves trying new food, and she identifies as Muslim, although she tells me to never worry too much about religion because it can be a bad thing. 

I used to stay with her and my grandfather for three weeks every summer when I was younger, but it was always more like bootcamp than vacation. If I spoke, it had to be in yes ma'ams and no thank yous. She assigned me a book to read every year and made me write in a journal - made me write about the book and my life- and then she'd read it to make sure I did it. I always had to help with dishes and cleaning and bringing in the nets full of flounder early in the morning. Every night I was required to fix the drinks and set the table, and everything had to be perfect: no forks or knives on the wrong side, no un-matching plates. If I spoke a grammatically incorrect sentence, she refused to acknowledge it until I fixed it. No ain'ts allowed, "they was?"

She also taught me how to paint and took me shopping at craft stores. We'd collect rocks and paint turtles on them to sell at the sea turtle hospital she still works at. We'd find shells at the ocean, only the kind with holes in the top of them, and we'd make our own wind chimes. We'd wake up early in the  morning, right at sunrise, and search the beach for nests of sea turtle eggs that were left there in the night, and then we'd rope them off, to keep them from being stepped on.