Seeing through her eyes

Getting used to being a Grandparent who plays cards!

I watched as the car drove away.  The two of them, two grandparents like us had been staying here for a week with their large family joining them for different days and nights.  They came from Cornwall and it was a big effort to drive all that way to Cambridgeshire and back and they weren't young.  They were the same age as us and we had so much in common.  Numbers of children and grandchildren, similar family holidays involving sea and sand and walking and swimming and climbing.  She, the grandmother was the one who caught my eye as the car drove away; it was the look in her eye, a yearning it seemed for the times when they were all around her and she was mother.  Her look caught my eye because I recognised so clearly some of what she was perhaps feeling.  Time passing and everything changing, babies becoming toddlers, toddlers to children, children to teenagers, teenagers to students, to careers and partners and their own babies coming and becoming the toddling ones.  I had watched the grandmother as she played with the small children, watched her shepherding them up the ladder to the wendy house, watched as she pushed them on the swing, watched as she sat with them inside playing games and colouring pictures of cows and goats and gruffalos!  She loved having them here and it was clearly a wrench to go.  I watched as the Grandpa rather tenderly opened the car door and in she got, he driving, she looking out and perhaps both of them remembering how they had packed all those children when they were small into the back of the car and taken them on holiday, taken them to school, and then maybe to university and then watched as they graduated, cheered as they got their first jobs, invited the girlfriends and boyfriends to join them for lunch and then hoped that they would be happy if they married, would be able to withstand all the pushes and pulls of life and the ups and downs of their families.  Hoped for the best for all of them, loving being with them, sad to leave, sad to go home to the house and garden in Cornwall and there to wait for the next chance of seeing them all together again.  A mixed feeling but maybe now they are settling down to Sunday television, they are over the sadness and have spoken to all of the now grown up children and heard they are all alright.  They have slotted back into their lives again.  That's the way it goes but we, the grandparents didn't think it would ever happen to us, we thought we would be ever young.