In this week’s Free Lance-Star column, I shared about the hilarious experience of moving my Grandmother into a senior citizens’ apartment building.

You can read that article here.

I am so blessed to still have my grandmother in my life and I am so thankful that I was able to give back to her in a very small way by helping her to move and to unpack. My grandmother has been a constant source of love and support. She has always been one of my greatest cheerleaders and biggest fans.

She stepped in to help raise me when my father left my mother. She made sure that I went to church every Sunday (and I have the perfect attendance Sunday School pins to prove it). We spent summers swimming in her pool and watching movies in her basement. We ate sun-ripened tomatoes on her back porch while watching old TV shows on her small black and white screen television.

Every Saturday was spent at the church where she served as secretary. The same church where both my mother and father and my husband and I were married. I would help her “run off the bulletins” on an old mimeograph machine––the original was typed on an old typewriter and was literally cut and pasted together.

June meant attending the church’s June Fair and November brought the Christmas Bazaar. I would help her and the other ladies prepare sweet confections to be sold.

I loved sitting on the old metal glider on her front porch while listening to her tell stories of younger years. Of how she worked in the Navy Yard in Portsmouth during the war. How she used to draw a line up the back of her legs with eyeliner so that it would look like she was wearing stockings. Of summers spent walking the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Most of all, I remember the love. The love she felt for not just myself, but everyone around her. I learned from her what it means to selflessly give to others. The world has been very blessed by Dolores Miller for almost ninety years. It is my prayer that God will continue to bless us with her love and life for many more to come.