I'm so excited to share a wonderful piece of writing with you this month. When I read it I found myself saying, then exclaiming, "YES! YES! That's exactly how I feel—about being a grandma, about my grandmas and even my mother." Her "picture" memories brought me to tears.

Our first guest columnist asked us to use her pen name of Forella Anshea. Forella was raised in Sacramento and moved to the foothills in the late 70's. Along with caring for a husband and two children, she has had various writing ventures: co-owning a commercial art business, attending UC Davis to earn an MA in writing, teaching part-time, and leading a semester-long study abroad program to Madrid. She currently serves as the Study Abroad Coordinator at a local community college campus. Thinking back over the past year, she shared, "It was one of the happiest years of my life; our family doubled in size as both our children married wonderful people and within months their first children, our first grandchildren, were born." Welcome to grandmamahood, Forella.

For all of you to savor, here is Forella's essay:
-Bev

"...were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely on memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one's personal truth."
-Vladimir Nabokov, from "Spring in Fialta"

For many of us first-time grandmothers, it is little wonder that those who cast the "long-drawn shadows" into our lives these days are our own mothers and grandmothers. These shadows have softened the tone of our personal truths; the lines we drew and the stands we made have blurred, and we recognize what the wise ones say about our essential connection and oneness.

Like many Westerners, particularly Americans, I've spent much of my life searching for my individuality. Many of us women who came of age in the late sixties were a rebellious, rowdy lot, hell-bent on claiming the many personal freedoms our mothers and grandmothers could only dream of. The times urged us toward independence, and in the process many of us rejected the way our mothers and grandmothers had lived their lives, seeing only the restrictions those traditional roles held. But it must be said, that we were driven by more than the just the times; we had born the consequences of our mothers' and grandmothers' restricted lives. It was best expressed by Gloria Steinem who wrote we were a generation of women who had mothered ourselves, in that so many of our mothers, including Steinem's, had lost themselves to the depression or the emotional shallowness that often accompanies a powerless life.

One has only to look at the black-and-white photographs of our grandmothers, who at 55 look, to our eyes, 75, to realize the incredible changes that have occurred in the last 50 years for most American women. Today not only do we women have careers outside our homes, we run marathons, ride motorcycles, rock climb, hold political office. Not only have many of us retained our "maiden" names, we've retained our health and our youthful appearance in ways women like my grandmother, who bore nine children, all 18 months apart, never considered possible. Differences, changes—this is our legacy, so it is little wonder that as the women of my generation become grandmothers this theme continues. There is, as they say, much grist for the mill in this subject.

And yet, at the same time I recognize and acknowledge this truth; I find myself casting my new-old eyes into those shadows where that holy paradox resides: yes, we are different; yes, we are the same. The idea of sameness dawns not with the activist's mind, but with the artist's mind, the mind that creates stories from Nabokov's sacred mix of memories and the heart's imaginings.

I note in conversations with my new-grandparent friends that we have begun to tell our stories differently; so often our narratives drift into a recalling of selective imagery: "I remember my grandmother's bedroom...my mother's rhinestone earrings...my grandmother's hands, her rosary beads...my mother's perfume...." We secure our memories in a net of imagery; innately we understand that the best way to remember, the best way to tell, the best way to capture your audience is by way of the senses. This is what the poets know, how they confer universality on a private moment.

With the birth of my first grandchildren this past year there have been a few moments when the thread connecting me to the lives of mother and grandmother pulled me into their shadows.

One day last winter my step-daughter and her husband spent the night with our seven-month old grandson. S has a skin condition that requires he wear clothing made of cotton only. As we dressed him for bed, my step-daughter told me she couldn't find one of those warm sleeping sacks for travel that weren't made from fleece, a fabric that aggravates his condition. I'm not quite sure why but I was upset by the idea that my little grandson couldn't have a warm sleeping sack for traveling. It seemed a little silly to be so upset because his mom had found alternatives and made sure he was perfectly comfortable and warm when they traveled. But I wanted him to have a sleeping sack. Period. A couple days later I found myself dusting off my old sewing machine then investigating organic fabrics from outlets I found on the net. The determination and pleasure I felt making my grandson a sleeping sack startled me a little. The texture and color of fabric, the threads, the whir of the machine, the pattern directions were all so consuming and the result so practical, so useful.

As I sewed, I recalled a short story I've taught a dozen times, "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker. The theme of the story centers on the meaning of heritage with the quilts (made from scraps of cloth from the family's clothing) as symbols of the transcendent quality of everyday things passed down from one generation to the next. I remember I looked up from the indigo fabric, from the shoulder seam I was pressing flat and I thought of my mother, sitting with her machine at the kitchen table, her shiny, black Singer with its gold filigrees whirring as she worked on my red velvet coat. I can't be sure what she was thinking as she sewed, but I know it was not about literature, about stories or poetry. We are very different, our lives and interests diverged long ago. Yet, as I ran the seams and notched the curves, I felt connected to her in a way I hadn't in years. What I noticed was physical at first; I recognized her in my hands, the way they moved as I guided the fabric, and in the way I held my mouth as I tried to solve the problem of the zipper. But there was something more, something in the spirit by which I'd approached to the task: determination, enthusiasm, but more, a kind of rightness in providing my grandchild with something at once practical and unique, something useful and long-lasting. These were my mother's qualities, qualities I'd overlooked, dismissed, even resented as I struggled to create a more independent self. I haven't been able to stop sewing since and when startled friends ask where I learned how to sew, it gives me great pleasure to tell them my mother taught me.

For years, I have kept tucked in my bottom drawer a black and white snapshot of my grandmother standing in her vegetable garden. She is stout and plain, her black hair pulled tight from her round, dark face, but her dress is showy, printed with fat bouquets of geraniums. I remember the reds and greens of this dress as I remember her earrings, gold and so heavy they pull her earlobes long, like the earlobes of the Buddha I keep in my kitchen. She is my immigrant grandmother, who in late summer would lead me through her garden, stopping here and there to bring my attention to a zucchini flower, a perfect globe of red tomato, the sweet smell of lemon blossoms. She spoke what we called "broken English," and all the while I followed her through the garden, she tended her plants telling me about them in her native tongue. I was just a child, six or seven, born and raised in California, but somehow I understood what she was saying—at least I thought I did, but now I think what I understood is that she loved her garden.

But there was something more, something richer and deeper to be understood from lingering in the garden with my grandmother and one day last spring when I took my granddaughter for a walk on a short trail near our house we call "our path," I was reminded of it. I held my granddaughter, barely six months old then, in a contraption that suspends her from my shoulders and kept her tight against my chest. The earth gave under my footsteps, softened from a raw spring rain and the wild oats and foxtails quilted with lupine and poppies. I rounded a familiar bend that gives way to a mild incline where sunlight pours into a bank of chaparral. Hemming the foot of the bank, awash in sunlight a carpet of wild mustard, all high notes of yellow in harmony with blades of green. In that moment my grandmother came to me. I saw her bending toward the earth to check the soil, to pick the zucchini flowers she cherished, and I heard her voice, the strange, foreign words she spoke to me as a child. What she was telling me is that this cycle of rebirth, this constant flowering is a miracle. I walked with my granddaughter into the mustard and knelt there. I let the flowers touch her face, let her tiny fingers reach for the blossoms and then I gave her the words: "mustard flowers," I said, the desire to pass along a version of my memory, to leave an imprint in her of love for those things that spring from the earth overriding the fact that E could not understand my words. I looked round at her face and repeated, "mustard flowers," and she gazed that dreamy, otherworld gaze you see in the eyes of the very new and the very old.