Making Potato Salad

I didn’t always like having brown eyes. My sister Marianne had blue eyes and she was older, taller and knew more about the world than I did. If I wasn’t like her, maybe I was the wrong one. (It didn’t help that I was also left handed and she was right handed…why did I have to be the one with so many flaws?)

We had Grandma with the Brown Eyes though. She was our great grandma, the mother of our grandpa who died when we were too young to remember him. We loved Grandma with the Brown Eyes! Among her charms were her sparkling disposition, lively family stories and pink phone in her’50s era rambler. She also had brown eyes. She greeted me by asking, “How are my brown eyes?” Her good-byes included, “Take care of my brown eyes.” When we visited her I thought that perhaps I was the luckiest girl alive to be blessed with brown eyes.

Different families have different legacies. Our parents have the dual history of pioneers—mainly from Scandinavia or Great Britain—crossing the plains to the West. Because of the entertaining stories Grandma with the Brown Eyes told us, I know more about her branch of the family than any other. She had a framed portrait of my grandpa, her son, looking handsome in his Army uniform with hat at a jaunty angle. I remember her taking the time to take my finger and point out pictures and names in her large Book Of Remembrance. She had a table covered with a piece of glass with more pictures underneath that she carefully told me about one by one.

Henrietta, her grandmother, crossed the plains when she was five and some nights cried for even a crust of bread. Sarah, her mother, was a beauty, widowed at a young age. They were characters alive. I felt roots sinking into the earth beneath me.

When I think of my great grandma, I think of those hazy early childhood memories in her wonderful house, I think of the pioneer stories, I think of the huge snowballs and peonies she grew on bushes in her yard and I think of potato salad.

One summer, when I was a little older and had I’m sure graduated from calling her Grandma with the Brown Eyes to Great Grandma Jaynes, she was visiting us along with her daughter-in-law, my grandma. My mom was making potato salad and asked my great grandma to make the dressing. She said, “No one makes potato salad like you do.” I think because I was old enough to appreciate what a good cook my mom was yet young enough to still think my mom must know everything, I was awed by that request. Great Grandma’s potato salad must be amazing.

I was old enough to help too. Old enough to feel grown up gathered around my mother’s kitchen table with paring knife in hand, peeling eggs and potatoes and slicing them. I was happily ensconced in a maternal nest that spanned four generations.

When I was in high school my great grandma died and I don’t think I’ve ever quite gotten over it.

I still love making potato salad. I have never made it for my family…I don’t really like it all that much. I love being gathered around the red checked tablecloth in my parents’ kitchen with my mom and sisters though. We peel and chop and talk until our hands are starchy and our souls are restored. The kind of restoration that always happens when you can reconnect and remember.