There are many ways to say I love you
For years, every Thursday my family has had lunch at grandma’s.
The tradition has had a few hiatuses, but overall I think it started almost a decade and a half ago.
Me, my brother, and a few of my cousins studied in the same school, and while we all lived a bit further away from it, grandma’s house was just two blocks down the road, which is how this all started.
People have moved away and came back (myself included), and visitors come on occasion, but whoever’s in town makes a special effort to pop by.
I remember last year looking at the weather forecast and seeing a nice weather window for a climb me and my dad had wanted to do for a while. Yet when I told him it would fall on a Thursday, he immediately rejected the idea. Thursdays are for lunch at grandma’s.
Grandma and I are especially close. Since moving back to Brazil I’ve been renting an apartment three blocks from her place (and consequently one from my childhood school) and I pop by somewhat frequently to play cards or have some food in the afternoon.
Seven or so years ago, grandma had what she believes was a stroke, although no doctor could find out what went wrong. For a year she struggled to keep her balance, became very forgetful, had difficulties speaking, and became generally weak.
I lived abroad at the time but as she was beginning to recover, I was spending some time in Brazil in between my military service and my university and ended up living at her place for almost two months.
We were somewhat close before but became exceptionally close during this period.
She was always extremely independent throughout her whole life, and as she was recovering from the lingering symptoms of whatever she had, she began loosening the restrictions the family had put up for her, without running it by anyone.
I became her confidant.
“Don’t tell your dad, but today I went up the street to buy strawberries by myself”.
Like a kid that does something wrong but feels they need to share it with someone and tells the grandparents rather than the parents, in this case it was grandma sharing her mischiefs with her grandson, hoping the sons didn’t find out.
I’d look at her disapprovingly each time, but then we’d laugh it off. Grandma was never one you could keep from doing what she wants.
During this period, a young me would also go out at night sometimes, only to come home in the early hours and find grandma asleep on the couch. Depending on how comfortable she looked, I’d either cover her or guide her to bed. Last year she told me about how she fell asleep on the couch and had a dream I was there and took her to bed.
We’d play cards often and tease each other about everything. To this day, our relationship includes a fair amount of jabs back-and-forth.
My relationship with grandma today isn’t one of those “visit your grandma once every now and then because you should”. We’re both really fond of each other’s company and good friends.
But during my whole life, I don’t think I’ve ever heard grandma say “I love you”. This is quite a contrast to my other grandmother who lives in another city and texts me that like every other night.
A big part of mine and grandma’s relationship these days has become me learning about her life. I’ll often ask her questions informally, but have also sat down a few times to do proper interviews where I recorded her and took notes.
Grandma was born on a farm and was one of seventeen children. Only seventeen because they didn’t count the ones that died as babies, as she tells me. Four of her siblings were from her father’s first marriage, and the other twelve are from the marriage with her mother, who was her father’s cousin.
I once made a comment about how despite her parents being cousins, the children all turned out alright, to which she replied, in her typical humor: “Well but everybody crazy!”
Her father died when she was four, and from a young age she had to work in the farm, doing things like picking or removing corn kernels from the cob.
As part of one of my interviews, I asked her if she ever heard the words “I love you” growing up.
She scoffed. “I don’t even remember mom ever picking me up in her arms”, she said. But then added understandingly: “We were so many, there was no time”.
I haven’t asked her yet whether she heard them from grandpa, but to be fair I doubt it. With how he grew up, I’m reasonably sure he didn’t learn those words either.
But in recent years, she started calling me to say she misses me when I’m traveling. When the World Cup was going on and she noticed I was keeping up with most games, she started watching the most random matchups like Poland vs Saudi Arabia and texting me about how the game went. And on every special occasion like Christmas or her birthday, she pulls me aside to recite some poems. She knows I love them, and recites my favorites each time. But somehow she also always manages to bring me a new one, even though she’s not reading them online, but rather making quite an effort to pull them from memory, since she learned them as a teen seventy years ago.
And then there are the lunches. Every Thursday she “complains” about how my youngest cousin doesn’t eat this or that thing so she always needs to cook something else for her. She “complains” about how my other cousin is a pescatarian so she cooks a bit of fish when we’re eating meat. She “complains” about how my brother doesn’t eat certain vegetables so cooks them separately from the main meal. She “complains” about how I don’t eat fish so makes some chicken for me on the side when fish is on the menu.
But she keeps adapting recipes and keeps inviting us over. It goes way beyond Thursdays too. She invites me to eat pão de queijo in the afternoons, and have breakfast on some mornings. Some nights I’ll be on my way home from the gym and just pass by to have dinner with her and she always has something extra ready for me in the fridge, just in case I were to pop by.
Because food isn’t just food at grandma’s.
It’s her own little way of saying it.
Love you too grandma.
Update: I was told by my mother that the Thursday lunch actually goes back more than thirty years, consequently having started before I was born. I guess me being a kid just used to think it was because of our school.