How could I forget?

They say time heals all wounds. So how come it hurts that I forgot my grandmother’s birthday yesterday. My mum had to text and remind me.

My Nan passed away in 2010.

Whenever something big or exciting or annoying or unpleasant happens in my life, I still reach for the phone to call her. Her phone number remains indelibly etched in my brain. Except she can’t answer anymore.

And I forgot her birthday.

Tell me that’s ok.

We scattered my Nan’s ashes last year, as Husband and the Sprogs looked on. I wrote about it in a blog called “So Many Tears”:

“We stood on the shore and I pointed out landmarks from tales I’ve told the kids about my childhood – there’s the sandbank where Aunty Kathryn cut her foot … here’s where we caught guppies in buckets … those little balls of sand are made by the crabs digging … Nana Peg would wake us at 6am to swim in the king tides, the water would go right up to those boats resting on the grass … my great-grandmother lived on a houseboat that was beached just over there …”

My dad and I waded out into the knee-deep water that day, he scattered my grandfather’s ashes, I scattered my grandmothers, so they mingled in the water, laying them to rest together.

I forgot her birthday, but I’ll never forget all the cool things she did for my sister and I as kids.

Like making our own meat pies on dinner plates and decorating them with the homemade pastry off-cuts.

And making a heart-attack-inducing slice every time we came to visit – biscuit base, caramel filling, Dessert Whip topping and sprinkles.

Packing picnics of cold pie and heart-attack slice and wandering along Hawks Nest beach to the base of Mount Yacaba to hunt for cowrie shells in the rock pools.

Filling an old wash-tin with sand and salt water, then adding guppies and brightly clawed crabs caught among the mangroves on the riverfront.

Buying mullet and bream from a local fisherman, tossing them in flour and Season-All and frying them with hand-cut chips in well-used oil. Then getting us to debone a special piece for Choo-Choo the dog to scarf.

Growing peaches and plums and lemons and mangoes and mulberries in the backyard and eating them straight from the tree.

Cultivating a mysterious and overgrown “fernery” for us to explore down the side of the house.

Waking us at dawn to swim in the Myall River during the chilly king tide.

Feeding us so much junk food on school holidays that we’d get heartburn.

Letting us watch so much TV our eyes went square.

Challenging us to endless games of Scrabble and dominos and Five Hundred.

Buying us holiday pets – guinea pigs, ducklings that mysteriously grew into geese, cockatoos … then tending to them once we’d gone.

Loving us hard.

Happy belated birthday, Nan. I miss you.