Grandma Katy

She smelled funny, she smelled old. Her skin was thin and stretchy and her fingers were so bent up from arthritis, they looked like a cartoon’s hands do after they get smashed. She had a scrunched up back and short, curly, perfectly white, thinning hair. As she clumsily added years onto her long, eventful life, she walked with a cane and broke her hip several times. Every once in a while, she’d sit and try to grasp a pencil and write all of the names of her grandbabies and great grandbabies. Grandma Katy could always remember all of them and most of their birthdays, no matter how rarely she saw them. I remember making puppy chow with her in her little matchbox of a home, and sitting on her lap as she told me stories at Grammy’s house. Never did she tell me a story of fiction, as those were not nearly as interesting as the ones she did tell. They were always stories from her life, and her family and whatever she remembered.
“You had a monkey?” my face was full of awe. I couldn’t believe how fortunate this woman was.
“It would lay on its back and drink root beer from a mug,” Grandma Katy’s false-toothed grin was priceless.
I remember one experience in particular about those teeth. One year, at the beach house, I had gotten a package of “Shockers”, and my cousins and I were sitting upstairs amusing ourselves by seeing who was daring enough to eat more sour candies than the others. Then we formulated a devious plot, and I went downstairs to where Great Grandma Katy was sitting eating her lunch on a chair in the living room.
“Would you like a Candy, Grandma Katy? They’re really good,” I had trouble hiding my grin.
“Aren’t those sour?” She looked at me expectantly.
“Oh, no, they’re very sweet. Not sour at all.”
“Oh, are they really? I see. All right, I’ll have one.”
Grinning, I handed her an orange candy and ran to the stairs where every cousin I had was sitting, heads poking out under the banister, eyes glued to Grandma Katy. We weren’t very sneaky. Grandma Katy looked up at us and grinned and then looked around at the aunts and uncles lounging around the living room, and popped the brightly colored candy in her mouth.
“OH! OH! OH!” her hands flailed around, as she exaggerated her wailing, and squinted her eyes. All of a sudden her jaw shuddered and with a flash of her tongue, her dentures flew into her lap. Every jaw dropped and every eye widened among the little kids on the stairs. Her teeth fell out! What had we done?!
Then Grandma Katy started laughing, picked up her top row of teeth and popped them back in. Soon, everyone was laughing, although it took a while for everything to sink in to the shaken Great Grandchildren. I had learned my lesson and scampered, giggling, to hug my animated Grandmother.