I knew the word manic depressive before I could read. 

My Grandma announced she was manic depressive the same way she announced we were her Half Puerto Rican Grandchildren.  The same way she said she was diabetic and had to check her blood sugar before deciding if she could eat a cheesecake or not. The same way, later in life, she announced she had breast cancer, and my sister and I would stand at the bathroom sink tending to her drains and not look away at the site of tubes filled with : GOODBYE CANCER!…Draiin awayyyyyyy.  Good riddance!

She was just matter of fact. and uncensored.

 After all, one thing Grandma E was not was afraid of dying. From the day we met her and fell in love she prepared us that she would one day not be here -but we would forever feel her.

Her wonderland play home was filled with books, magazines , newspapers and tabloids  piled up on her coffee table like an eclectic museum , library-coffee shop bookstore. This is where my sister and I would watch Jeopardy, Family Feud and The Wizard of Oz while baking cookies, divinity candy, peppermint cupcakes and blueberry kuchen. 

  Her wonderland home  would set my foundation for the love of story telling, panning through my choice of reading while she told her own stories. She made my sister and I  make shift chairs from paint cans so we could sit properly at the coffee table and savor her  home made pot roast slathered in gravy melting the carrots and potatoes with love and teasing appeal:  who will you eat first?

It was known from her tone of the word  manic depressive that she was not ashamed of her diagnosis almost proud and yet others perhaps held it in a different light. According to her she was sent to the hospital – her prized items were thrown away  as she was labeled a hoarder. As a kid, I thought the hoarding was a gift. I read her hoarded tabloids with the a curious pleasure maybe the same way I social media scroll today. 

I read Prevention magazine learning how to be healthy and free of diseases. Don’t get fat like your Granma she would say between checking her blood sugar which she allowed us to help with. I am gonna die fat and happy even if they have to chop off my legs. The visual of her cut off legs while eating bavarian creme donuts spoke to her utter acceptance of how she wanted to live and die. She liked to also remind us we didn’t have to be fat or diabetic. We were us and she was she. She didn’t have naturally curly hair like we did, she had to coil her hair with bibby pins to cerate what we were born with. She shouted our gifts so we could be proud and others could be informed. This is my half Puerto Rican granddaughter who is a writer and a gymnast.  Not as skinny as her Mom but not as fat as her Grandma.

We would rub Myoflex  muscle cream our bodies (which she said helped all ailments) following her lead as she complained of aching joints. We would beg her to take off her dentures and see her gums. Try on her marvelous glasses that made us see blurry.  We would jump on her body when she lay across  the sofa calling her Mountain . My sister and I would ride on her leg like she was a hobby horse. 

At  Grandma’s Wonderland, I read Readers Digest – scrolling to find my fave sections: 

Laughter is the Best Medicine and  All in a Days Work where readers could send in their snippet of a funny work day.  

Readers would mail in a paragraph for print and receive  $100 for telling a joke which  sounded just dandy to me, but not as fab as seeing your name in print and imagining how many people you may make laugh!

 Before I knew what a job was the idea of telling your funny of the day and leave an audience on their seat waiting for the punch line only to laugh was the best gift ever.

This gave me the habit of dinner table talk – where my siblings and i would compete for the funny of the day telling our day at the dinner table. My goal was to make my sister laugh so hard she would barely be able to breathe and maybe even squirt milk out her nose. 

Dad said the tabloids were junk, but the junk food felt equally as joyful as Readers Digest .Different than a can’t stop laughing feel- more like in a fantasy way to detract from the heaviness of life. And speaking of telling stories….. the tabloids which made up silliness about aliens and celebrities  were WAY  better than the dooms day religion stories that gave us nightmares of Armageddon and destruction and demons lurking about the earth to trap us to sin. 

Grandam E with her Manic depression and hoarding taught me how to shield my mind from things that did not belong there. Armageddon and demons? Change the channel. Flip the change. Pick a new book with your mind and tell a different story. 

When I sat at bible study and the S-C-A-R-I-E-S  came over me with talks of demons devouring sinners and being destroyed for sins I looked forward to committing when I got older such as:  fornication, masturbation, Sodom and Gomorra type  sex,  smoking , voting, blood transfusions and anything else worldly deemed a sin….I would day dream myself away.

I would take my mind to another scene: A flashback memory of Grandma E  hoisting me up outside every time we threw out the garbage and let me swing from the pipe. She would  hold on to my waist and let me hold the thick metal bar quadruple my height from the ground.  I would  have butterflies in my stomach and demand her to  LET GO and let me try  to hang  all by myself. 

I could feel not one ounce of her was worried of me falling. She believed in me.. 

 When we sat in bible study three days a week for two hours at a time- I could pretend i was paying attention- but when the words got too  worrisome  and I started to feel demons surrounding me for my impure thoughts of looking forward to the sins that would get me destroyed- I would stare off into space and create a new image in my mind. I would go back to My Grandmas backyard with the hanging bar.

I would  feel the metal of the bar on my hand, the feeling of swinging my legs back and forth the butterflies would come and then I would make up things I had not yet learned- flip backwards over the bar, push into a handstand like the olympic gymnasts-around and around one two and three times-double flip backwards off! I would play a song in my head and choreograph routines. I could be in two or three places at one time and say my own prayer in my head when the words did not fit me. 

Now when I watch my mom as a Grandma, I see her own Wonderland of gifts she has created to offer her grandchildren:  unconditional love and resilience. Meals cooked with love and savoring . Daring music played on the piano with passion and transformation. Trust in the creative flow passing through her heart to veins to fingertips. Songs at the piano , art on the walls, framed photos of adoration. Awards boasted on the refrigerator. Unconditional love wrapped with the best gift : an inheritance that can’t be seen but can be felt in your belly and heart and gets stronger with each generation .