Nadia and Oma had been close when she was growing up. She knew, even when she was little, that her grandmother was different from those of her friends. She was fun. And embarrassing at times, Nadia had felt occasionally as a teenager, as Oma didn't care what others thought of her, and certainly didn't worry about pleasing everyone.
“I tell it like it is,” she would often say, shrugging her shoulders.
As an adult, Nadia was gaining more appreciation for her grandmother whose life could be called many things except easy. Nothing involving her grandmother was ever easy, for anyone least of all for Oma herself—life had been hard for her and she had learned to return the favour by nature. Having grown up in a time of prosperity, with loving parents and sister, Nadia found it difficult, even impossible, to imagine how Oma looked at the world. Nadia had always been the one trying to understand her grandmother, though Nadia’s parents were the ones who took care of her now that old age was trying to steal Oma's most prized possession, her independence.
Like her grandmother, Nadia had immigrated as an adult, though the circumstances in which they left their countries of birth couldn't have been more different. Since moving to another continent, Nadia saw her grandmother only once every two years. Her parents were the only relatives Oma had left in the Netherlands after Nadia's sister moved overseas too. And Oma didn’t make it easy for them. If she knew how to use the speed dial function on her landline, the policeman she called at least once a week would be on it. Nadia had never met him but would like to one day. From what Oma had told her, it sounded like he was as supportive and understanding as he could be when she called to tell him about another crime Nadia's dad had committed against her.
Not that Oma was always nice to this cop. When he was recovering from a knee reconstruction and stumbled around on crutches, she had said to him, “Serves you right. Now you know what it means when it’s hard to get around.”
Oma had trouble walking, especially since she had a hip replacement that left her right leg about three inches shorter than the left one. She told Nadia how she had confronted the surgeon when she went for a check-up weeks after the operation. His response was that a difference in leg length was a common result from such a procedure and that she had clearly been warned about this eventuality in the paperwork she had signed before the surgery. Oma said she hadn't read the fine print and that no one had told her about this supposedly common side-effect. An active walker all her life, “I walk like I'm drunk all the time now,” she told Nadia often, though less so in recent years now that her memory was slowly fading.
A resourceful woman who refused to waste anything, Oma wrote letters to Nadia that often contained a note of 5 or 10, sometimes 20, euros. The bill was always carefully wrapped in foil that usually had contained chocolate at one point. Nadia had never asked specifically for the reason Oma wrapped the money so carefully but knew her grandmother had learned the hard way during the Second World War that mail and packages were checked, often opened. Valuable items went missing, never arriving at the intended destination.
Nadia had kept the letters her grandmother had begun writing to her when Nadia moved out of her parents' home as a university student 21 years ago. She had not told Oma she had preserved nearly all her correspondence, which she had recently filed by year of writing, as Nadia was convinced her grandmother would be angry about her doing so. She had told Nadia more than once to burn the letters as soon as she had read them, so they wouldn’t be seen by the wrong pair of eyes.
As for the difference in the length of her legs since the hip operation, Oma found a solution. Rather than go to a shoemaker (“I used to be one and was married to one,” Oma would say), she adjusted the shoes herself. Using tape and old pieces of carpet, she constructed a heel that set her level again; a creative resourcefulness that didn’t cost a cent. She had even crafted a heel for the sheepskin slippers Nadia had mailed from Australia.
Oma loved practical gifts almost as much as she hated stand-in-your-way trinkets, most of the time at least. Sometimes you thought you had given her something useful and she would get mad. Like when Nadia bought her a new shower head to replace the old one that was so calcified only a trickle of water was able to get through. Oma was furious. She put the old showerhead in vinegar for three days.
“It’s as new,” she told Nadia, handing her back the new one and ordering her to return it to the store for a refund. It was wasteful to buy new when the old was perfectly fine. Nadia had found herself smiling. She should have known better.
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