Grammy Squeak & the Cow Dress

Molly has a cow dress in her closet.

It’s been hanging there since before she was born.  Black and white checked, with a large cow face appliquéd on the front, and flouncy, cow-print ribbons stitched onto each shoulder.

It was a gift from her Great-Grandma Squeakie. 

The weather could have been anything the day after Molly was born.  I wouldn’t have known.  She was born in the late evening, and the days leading up to her birth had been long.  It was after midnight when we arrived at our maternity suite.  Molly was swaddled and sleeping in her bassinet and Ryan and I were making preparations to settle into sleep ourselves when the maternity nurse came in for a visit.  When I told her I planned to breastfeed, she matter-of-factly replied, “well have you?” I had not.  I didn’t know it was officially time to start. It was indeed, she told me.  And so we did that. “I’ll come wake you in two hours,” she told Ryan and me.   I felt like once I closed my eyes I would sleep for two days (or months, or years), “because she will be hungry again then.”  And so in two hours she was back again.  And then again. And again.  Newborns have stomachs the size of a walnut, or green pea, or something tiny like that.

I don’t remember what the weather was like outside, but I know the room was still lit with the white light of early morning when there was a knock on the door.  I was bleary and tangled in my pajamas and thin hospital bed sheets.  I felt I had hardly closed my eyes since our last visit from the nurse, and yet here she was knocking again.  Except it wasn’t her. It was my Aunt Sandra and Grandma Squeak.  The nurse was on their heels and slid past them as they entered the room.  “Is it ok?” she asked me, “they showed up, it’s so early, I didn’t know.”  It was ok.  I remember placing Molly in my grandmother’s arms, and for the first time thinking of all of the babies she’d held.  Later, with some of my friends, I’d have to say things like, “you sort of go like this,” and position their arms, then remind them to support her head before handing Molly over to them, but my Grandmother, like so many mothers, knew just how to hold a newborn.  Molly didn’t startle, or fuss, she didn’t even wake.  Instead she slept soundly in the secure curve of my grandmother’s arm, her tiny body pressed against the soft velour of her purple track suit.

She had brought gifts of course.  Four diaper covers with brightly colored flowers stitched to the behinds.  Grandma Squeakie’s gifts never blended in.  In the years she bought me elephants there were figurines made of blown glass, or bejeweled ones that clicked open to silk lined caverns where you could store pennies or secrets. There was one with a long curved trunk for holding rings, and there were carved elephants with brightly painted eyes and ears and feet.  There was never a simple grey elephant.  That wasn’t her style. And my grandmother had style to spare.

Molly is growing fast.  If I put it on her, the cow dress would probably just fit.  But I don’t put it on her.  Molly quickly got the hang of nursing, and so she has outgrown the flowered diaper covers my Grandmother brought to the hospital.  She has also outgrown the whale and strawberry outfits her great-grandmother Squeakie picked out for her.  This dress, the cow dress, will be her, and my, last gift from Squeak.  She’d given me the dress at my baby shower.  For her to wear on the farm, Grandma Squeak had written on the card in wobbly cursive.  A farm girl herself, I doubted my grandmother had ever worn a dress such as this in the fields.  Pictures show her barefoot and in overalls, sitting atop the combine.

In the weeks after Molly’s birth, my Grandma Squeakie passed away.  There was a ride to the hospital in an ambulance, and a late night, where everyone came to visit.  Molly came too, though she stayed in the car with her Papa, because she was still so little, and hospitals can be a dangerous place for a little girl with a brand new immune system.  At the hospital we reminisced, and my grandmother said things like, “Sandra I don’t think I will be able to go to the dump with you tomorrow,” (as they had planned), “we’ll have to go on Saturday.”   For the next few days everyone came to see her in the hospital.  The same as they had when she had her hip replacements in the years before.  And then, on the third day, after an evening of telling jokes (“repaint, repaint, and thin no more!), she passed away.   

Sara, my mother, and I visited our god-mother Marcey recently. Marcey has always had a fondness for butterflies, and when we were there, she showed us the many things that my grandmother had designated for her to receive.  Things like a butterfly teapot, dish towels, a creamer (which my grandmother collected), a cup and saucer.  Later, an elephant arrived for me.  Small, and filled with beans, a child’s toy, unlike any she had ever given me before—an elephant for Molly.  It was soft, and traditional: a simple grey elephant.  With enormous, bright pink, ears.

And though ruffled and cow-printed, or once again elephant-shaped, these are the two last things my grandmother picked for me (or for Molly, who is of me).  And I know it isn’t in the things-- it’s never in the things, but it’s in the moment, her thinking of Molly and me, the way I thought of her when I pulled a bouquet of flowers for her at the supermarket, always choosing the brightest colors, because those were always the ones she seemed to like the best.