I see her in my face sometimes. I recognize her in my patience with other people, in my curiosity, in the importance I place on truth, and especially in the way I love.

Her stories remain. Her lessons remain.

And somehow, so does she.

The funny thing is, I don’t think Little Grandma Rose could have ever imagined the person I eventually became.

I am not who she thought she was raising, even though I am.

There are parts of my life she probably wouldn’t understand at all. My beliefs evolved. My relationships with spirituality, religion, knowledge, and even the idea of certainty changed dramatically.

Grandma Rose was deeply Christian. God sat comfortably at the center of her world, and she brought Him into ours too.

She was probably the greatest religious influence of my childhood.

I asked her everything.

What about dinosaurs?

What about people who lived before Jesus?

Why are there so many religions?

Are all those people wrong?

Grandma had answers.

I grew up and found more questions.

I’ve written before about how my spiritual journey eventually carried me somewhere Grandma probably never expected me to go. But strangely, I don’t think I traveled there away from her.

In some ways, I think I kept walking down a road she helped put me on.

I remember the Britannica salesmen and those beautiful books she kept on a shelf near the front door of her home. I remember looking at them and knowing somehow that they contained pieces of a world much bigger than mine.

And goodness, could Grandma and I talk.

I remember sitting at her kitchen table for hours. Questions, stories, ideas, whatever wandered through my young mind could find its way to that table.

She would tell me what she thought.

I would ask something else.

And we would keep talking.

There was another little table in her house too.

A small round wooden table tucked into a darker corner just outside the kitchen. I’ve written about that table because somehow, all these years later, I can still return there in my mind. Sometimes through memory. Sometimes through meditation. Sometimes seemingly without trying at all.

That house lives inside me.

Maybe that’s true of certain people too.

They become places we can return to.

Grandma Rose grew up in a world profoundly different from mine. She was a child of the Depression. The information available to her, the traditions surrounding her, and the things considered unquestionably true were different from what I inherited.

As a child, I couldn’t understand that.

Now I can.

It reminds me of something I have come to think of as the sliver.

Every one of us experiences only a tiny portion of everything there is to know. We look through our particular window at the world and, if we aren’t careful, mistake our view for the entire landscape.

Grandma had her sliver.

I have mine.

And one of the things I hope I’ve learned is how to bend toward somebody else’s window and try to understand what the world looked like from where they stood.

Understanding someone’s sliver doesn’t mean adopting it as your own.

It means recognizing that none of us sees everything.

Maybe that’s another thing Grandma taught me, although neither of us knew she was teaching it at the time.

There are things Grandma believed that I no longer believe.

There are things I believe that she almost certainly would have challenged.

Oh, we would have had some conversations.

But I know something else about her.

She would have loved me.

When I didn’t have many friends, she made me feel like that was okay. You didn’t need everyone. A few good friends mattered. Sometimes one good friend was enough.

When I felt different, she somehow made different feel survivable.

When I didn’t know yet that I was special, she did.

There is enormous power in having somebody believe in you before you’ve figured out how to believe in yourself.

Eventually, some of their voice becomes yours.

Maybe that’s why I recognize her when I am patient with someone.

Maybe that’s why I care so much about people feeling seen.

Maybe that’s part of why kindness matters so much to me.

I certainly didn’t inherit perfection from Little Grandma Rose.

Goodness.

I could tell you stories about that little lady that would make you laugh, others that would make you cry, and probably a few that would have you asking whether we’re talking about the same sweet woman.

We are.

She was human.

So am I.

I’ve never believed loving someone requires turning them into a saint.

Sometimes loving someone means seeing all of them and understanding that the imperfect person standing before you can still change your life.

Even her death left me with questions.

Hours after Grandma Rose died, something happened with the numbers on a cable box that became the beginning of my much longer relationship with synchronicity, patterns, spirituality, and the number 22.

Was it something mystical? Something psychological? Coincidence? Some combination of things I don’t have language for?

I don’t know.

And perhaps that is one of the greatest differences between the little girl Grandma Rose helped raise and the woman I became.

She gave me certainty when I was little enough to need certainty.

Life taught me how to live with the questions.

I no longer need an answer for every mystery in order for the experience to hold meaning.

Maybe that is why I can look back at Grandma’s faith differently now too.

She lived within what she knew, just as I live within what I know.

Neither of us could see the whole thing.

None of us can.

Today, I am living a life she couldn’t possibly have pictured while we sat together at that kitchen table.

Honestly, neither could I.

I never imagined I would build this particular life. I never imagined I would buy a little house in Springfield, Missouri. I certainly couldn’t have imagined CherryCoBiz or the hundreds of thousands of words I would eventually spend trying to understand life, people, truth, spirituality, love, and myself.

Life still wobbles.

Mine certainly has lately.

But I can sit inside my home and know something very important.

I am safe.

I am grateful.

I am loved.

I have the smallest home, but it holds the biggest heart.

And I know where some of that came from.

There is still a little girl somewhere inside me sitting at a kitchen table with Little Grandma Rose, asking another question.

There is still a second table tucked around the corner.

There are still numbers that occasionally make me stop and wonder.

There is still a woman who died twenty one years ago teaching me things about the woman I am becoming today.