My nanna always felt old to me, which is hardly surprising because even assuming that I have clear memories of her from age 5, that would have made her 73 years old. She was a thin woman of about medium height. I remember her hair being a light brown or even apricot colour but of course coloured rinses were very much the norm back then and it wasn't long before she started to have the blue-rinse look.
She was quite a happy person and was not grumpy but was very much "down to business". As soon as we'd turn up at her house, she would start hitting us with mathematical questions or she would ask us to look at the clock and tell her the time. It was often a bit of a chore and we'd usually be quite happy to be out of the house and playing outside.
She was always very good with plants and the back room of the house was often covered in a choko vine bearing heavy green vegetables. She had a mulberry tree out the back which my sister and I used to climb. It was full of fruit and we'd take a bowl to collect some but would end up eating just as many while we were up in the tree. We'd come out with purple-coloured faces and clothes. She grew strawberries near the back door (but it was always hard to get them because the snails were fast in that garden). She grew rhubarb and pumpkins and lettuce out further up the back. Then, right at the end of her property, there was a huge mandarin tree which was often full of fruit. I would climb all the way to the top and drop the fruit down for her and my mother to catch.
I don't remember seeing my nanna with many animals though she certainly had fish in her fish pond when we were little. She also used to have a lot of wild lizards about. I remember her telling us about "her friend" the lizard that would come out when she was doing the gardening. We didn't think anything of it until one day when we were sitting in the car rolling down her driveway. She said to us, "oh look, her comes my friend now". It's wasn't a blue-tongue lizard, it was a goanna and it was huge. She used to struggle with our dog Spotty because he was so jumpy and the slightest scratch would give her terrible leg problems. As he got older though, she began to identify with him more and more and they'd often sit together and she'd talk to him. She used to say that she understood him because they both had the same sorts of problems with age.
My nanna's cooking was not particularly good. She lived by herself for a long, long time and guess that meant that she was a bit out of practice. Usually her food was cold by the time it made it to the table. She was also quite a plain eater with no interest in spices. One thing that she did used to make was "horikoshi". This was a special variant of mince that we assumed she'd picked up when she was working for a japanese company. We've never been able to find the receipie so it's quite possbile that she made it all up.
My nanna had a very keen intellect and a great memory. She would often talk about historical events that had occured during her lifetime including the sinking of the Titanic and the Russian revolution. She'd obviously not been involved in either of these but she talked about how the news broken in Australia and I found these discussions fascinating. She was also a great listener and could listen to me talk about computers and Star Wars and would ask sensible questions. I used to give her Stephen King books to read and it was great to have someone else in the family that I could discuss them with.
My nanna was also a terrible nag. If she wanted something done, she had a way of picking at it until you gave up and did it. One time, my mother was at a cousin's picnic at Bobbin Head. The car got parked in and she couldn't move it. My nanna wanted her to leave it alone and wait until other people moved but my mother wanted to go home. She asked a nearby fisherman for help. The fisherman started to help but my nanna kept shouting that he would destroy her beautiful car and so eventually he gave up rather than operate under that pressure. As I got older, my nanna was the only one who could really get underneath my skin and we had some terrible shouting matches. I'm not proud of these and would give anything to take them back. The one thing that calms me at least is that I know that if I didn't love and respect her as much as I did, her words would never have had the power to upset me.
In her later years, my nanna moved to a retirement village. She was very happy there as she'd been quite lonely at home and this gave her a chance to catch up with lots of friends. She loved having other people cook for her and said that she would often get stares from the other residents when she did something quirky, such as putting sugar on her lettuce. She also had big issues with food being wasted and would always collect fruit - even if she wasn't hungry. When we'd visit her on weekends, she would have a cupboard that was entirely full of fruit.
My nanna's legs used to bleed a lot. I guess she would have been on blood thinners. Her hands and legs were covered in blotchy dark red patches and looked very painful. She also had bunions on both feet which she used to say hurt a great deal. It didn't stop her from getting out and walking everywhere. She especially loved walking to the Villa Maria church, to the Hunters Hill senior citizens club and to the bus stops. It was while she was on one of those walks that a local politician's son shot her with his BB gun. The steel ball lodged in her ankle and although they managed to keep the damange to a minimum, she never felt safe enough to walk around again. The police were called but the politician obviously had some influence over them and they ignored her story.