There was an old woman …

"I can whistle now, Grandmother."

Richard asked me to watch their kids from 7:30 am to 9:30 am.

I had to check to see if I had heard that right.

An early morning watch is not the same as taking care of kids at night.

And on a holiday morning, so there wasn’t much chance of doing more than hanging at their house until they all woke up.

Betty was the first up. I grabbed her Nursery Rhyme book and started at the front of the book with her, saying the rhymes I know she knows, for we have been deep into this book before.

The last poem I remember helping her memorize was Higgelty, piggelty, my black hen / She lays eggs for gentlemen ….

As we went through the pages I tried to focus on the less well known rhymes. After a number of pages I could feel a theme coming on: There was an old woman lived under a hill / There was an old woman tossed up in a basket / There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. “Oh, I really like that one, grandmother.” We talked a lot about an old women and we looked at the pictures to see how all of her children lined up for food.

I asked her if she knew any old women. She drew a blank. I told her that old women have so many wrinkles on their faces that you can hardly see any flat skin anymore. Way more than are on my face. I also told her that they have gnarled hands, a bit like mine, only much worse. I told her that we will be on the look out this year and see if we can find any old women in real life. We looked at the ones in the nursery rhyme book, their backs bent, or their little cottages tucked right inside of a hill.

“This is my favourite nursery rhyme,” she said, as we came to ‘I saw three ships come sailing in’. I sang it three times for her. All 6 verses each time. The last verse was really fun for me. The previous verse said that there were three women in the ship and then the lyrics go,

One could whistle, and one could sing,
And one could play the violin,
Such joy there was at my wedding
On New Year’s Day in the morning.

"I can do Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled
 peppersby myself, Gandmother."

I wondered if Betty would wince on the 3rd line, for accent is off on the word wedding.

She didn’t mind. She has learned to whistle, so we tried to figure out which of the women in the picture it was that is the whistler.

I had no idea I could have so much fun with her, and with the nursery rhymes. Her siblings slept on.

Betty took some cream cheese flavoured with chives out of the fridge and put it on Ritz crackers for her breakfast.

 I wouldn’t have let my own children do that.

For her, I went to get a small, warm wet cloth and put it in a dish so that she could wash the stickiness of the cream cheese off of her fingers as she tried to make the cracker herself.

As a grandmother I consider that  crackers and cheese a perfectly normal meal.

Arta