September 28, 1990: Nancy brought Dane with her this weekend. Saturday she took me to Wayne and I ordered a new mattress and spring. On Sunday she cleaned the lower kitchen cupboards."
For some reason Grandma's entry about the kitchen cupboards makes me think of when I was a kid and being sent to the kitchen to get something. And of not knowing right away where the something was. "In the east cupboard" or "in the middle drawer on the west side." I have no idea how many fruitless minutes I spent staring around instead of asking (again) which was east and which was west. Shoot, there were windows on only one wall, so it would have helped a lot if Grandma had said "the window side" or "the non-window side".
When I was in high school, Grandpa and Grandma and I went to western Nebraska for a family reunion. For the entire weekend we were there, Grandpa could not get his directions straight. North seemed something other than north to him. I didn't laugh at him, but I remember distinctly not giving a hoot and wondering why Grandpa was so hung up on the issue.
Then five or so years later I went to Syracuse, New York for legal assistant training. For a whole summer, north was south and south was north to me. It was dreadfully unsettling. I would stare out the window and say to myself, "Canada is that way" but it always seemed like the equator was most definitely that way. Apparently with all the extra living under my belt since that family reunion, I had come to have an appreciation for knowing which way was which. Thankfully, I have rarely had that feeling again. It seems my internal compass is fairly accurate.
The photo is of me during one of our trips to North Carolina. Which is on the east coast, in case you wondered.
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