Blue is my favorite color, but the blue I am talking about isn't a color.  It's the feeling you get when you're down.  For some unknown reason I have had the blues over the past few days.  It just kind of hit me out of nowhere.  Maybe I've been doing too much thinking again.  Maybe it's the weather.  Maybe it's hormones.  Maybe it's a combination of it all. 

I have been thinking of my Grandma lately.  I don't really know why she's been on my mind, but lately she has been.  The Grandma I am writing of is my Dad's mother.  Her name was Juliana.  I named my daughter after her.  As a child, I don't know that I ever heard her name spoken out loud.  If it was, it was probably the German version, Yula, short for Julia.  At any rate, she died when I was about 10 years old and it broke my heart.  I was the daughter of her baby, so I've always felt I got shorted in the Grandma department!  She was a very inspiring woman though.  She wanted to teach me to crochet, but I wasn't ready to learn yet.  My first recollection of her was when I went back to North Dakota with my Aunts after my Grandma's husband died.  We were going back to gather her up and move her in with my Aunt back here in Montana.  She lived there for a while, then progressed to using a walker, then finally bed-ridden in the local nursing home.  To my knowledge she never complained.  She spoke a lot of German, so if she did complain, I never understood it!  :-)  I have a newspaper clipping of her in the nursing home crocheting.  Her hands were bent from the arthritis she suffered from, but she would still hold a crochet hook in her hand.  They featured her resilience!  Truly inspiring.  She never threw anything away and always had a supply of thread to make things with.  When she died, there was a little shoe box of odds and ends of thread all rolled into small balls.  I was given that box and still have it today.  I've never been able to use it for anything.  I just keep it as it was back then.  It's a reminder of my Grandma and her thriftiness.  I am still amazed at the memory of her smile each time we'd go visit.  If she was in pain, I never knew it. 

We mostly visited on Sundays and quite often would roll her in her bed down the hall to church.  The nursing home didn't have a piano so my dad refinished one my Aunt had given us and we donated it in my Grandma's name.  That piano is still there in that nursing home.  They always used to play the old hymns for the church services and to this day a lot of those songs will bring tears to my eyes. 

So even though I've been feeling blue, I have to think of my Grandma in that bed in the nursing home, crocheting away and watching Bonanza on TV.  It all brings a smile and makes me thankful I was born of the same stock.  I know she's up there smiling down at all my farming antics.