"The Little Lady" (Personal Essay No. 1)

 One of my classes this term is a Nonfiction English class that requires a great deal of personal essay-writing. Since I have been meaning to write and blog more, I am (hopefully) going to be posting the essays here. This was written in-class, writing nonstop, on graph paper.
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It was summer and we were in the music room at my parent’s house: bay window before us, piano on the right. She was sitting on that rocking recliner she had reupholstered for my dad years earlier. I always felt a kinship with the fishermen on the fabric. She was my grandmother, Lois, grammie, probably wearing some purple polyester getup like always. I don’t remember what I was doing before she called me over, or what I was wearing, but it was just the two of us in the room, it was afternoon, and it was summer.
    She held the book as she explained its significance to me. “I’ve had this book for a long time,” she said, her gnarled hands tenderly holding the worn pages. I recognized it, then, I think, like she had read it to me before. Maybe she hadn’t. But I feel like I felt it was a book I already knew. I remember her handing it to me, gently, warning me to not let it fall open. I no longer remember whether she or dad taped the binding, an ungraceful attempt at slowing the deterioration that had already begun: pages, pictures, and stories missing, numbered pates our of their intended sequence.
    I held the book before she said we should write my name in it. I saw her name, Lois Burnett, next to the name of her sister who died when she was still small: Gladys Burnett. I knew then I was not holding a mere book in my hands, it was her memory itself, and she entrusted it to me. To me, in ink, as she wrote my name and the date next to her own and some other name I did not recognize. The dates were decades apart, spanning nearly a century.
    I read the book, with her and by myself, I read it several times. The title was and still is “The Little Lady: Her Book” and was published in the early 1900’s. Just as the title suggests, the stories are about a little girl growing up in a big house and all that happened to her: big man and puppies and sweets and stores in her fathers office, stores she set up there and then made him pay for.
    I read it again last year, and I cried, because the book  was just as sweet as I remembered, but my grammie was gone so I couldn’t tell her how much I still enjoyed it, still enjoyed the graceful cover, the illustrations that were intended to be black and white but were colored in by some child less precocious than I. I still loved the words of the story, the words on the pages, the words in my hands. Far beyond the fear I felt when it was first handed to me, like I should encase it in plastic, now it sits in a place of honor, in company with other old beautiful books I’ve collected. Maybe I picked up those other books because I never wanted the Little Lady to be lonely.
    I have been many things, but lonely was never really one of them. I always had those books, even when grammie died I was left with a pack of cousins who help keep her memory alive, parents who help fill in the gaps in my memory, and a note in the cover of the Little Lady that proves I was loved.