Nooks and Grannies

My parents decided to go to China and since we're still babies, guess who came to baby-sit us? Our grandmother (paternal). And if ever a grandmother needed to be fed George's marvelous medicine this is the one. I think Cinderella only hated her stepmother because she hadn't been exposed to the company of a grandmother. Usually when she's coming by to spend the night I moan and groan and weep inside because I don't want her to get all my soft pillows, to have to give up my bed, to go around cleaning things I don't want to clean and to have to listen to her opinions about how I'm too skinny in all the wrong places and how I study too much. And this time was no different. Well, only different in the sense that I plastered on a fake smile since I didn't want to ruin the before-traveling moments of my second-honey-mooning-in-about-a-quarterofacentury parents.

So this entire week (okay, three days) I've been descending the stairs fearlessly even though I know that the moment she gets sight of me from her throne (the sofa in the lounge) she's going to call me to dial a billion phone numbers into the phone, to check a billion times if the maid is doing everything okay and if everything is okay in the courtyard, she'll make me open the fridge and replace everything in minimally small boxes and will ask me a hundred questions about my life and then not wait for an answer because she's in a hurry to regale me with stories about how things are back at her house. Not to mention that she'll ask me to repeat everything I say about a billion times because she can't hear very well.

So technically, I should be celebrating her departure; due in three days. But, as it happens, I'm dreading it. Why don't I want her to leave?? I think that in some obscure, complicated way, she's found for herself a nook in my heart.