Flashback Friday

This is a picture of my Grandmother, wasn't she a classy lady. I'm off to go visit her today.

Oh yeah, closing on the house today as well.

Flashback Friday

In 1979 my grandparents rented a four-plex in Florida and the whole family all trekked there for Christmas. My grandmother cut the words to one of her favorite songs out of gold foil paper and taped them to the wall in the hall. These were also always over the fireplace when we had Christmas at her house. I bring this up because this year my sister (top right corner of the picture) has gone to Florida with her kids and husband's family to enjoy the sun and surf for the holidays. This was a great time and we had a lot of memories from this trip. I hope Marti and family create their own memories. (Also in picture, my cousin Danny, top left, cousin Debbie, bottom right, and me, bottom left.)

Merry Christmas to everybody!!

I'm Becoming My Grandmother

My mom's mom, Grandma V., introduced me to massages 14 years ago in Hot Springs, AR. Grandma always loved getting massages when she and Grandpa would go to Hot Springs, so even though Grandma was no longer able to go get one for herself, she insisted that my sister and I both go and be massaged. As I said, Marti, my sister, and I had never had massages before.

The place that we went to in Hot Springs was an old school "spa" with the mineral baths and hadn't really been upgraded since they opened in like the 1920's (I kid, but still). So we go down and check in and we are pointed to these little closets and are told to put our clothes on the hooks there and somebody would come and wrap a sheet around us and take us to the relaxation area. Mind you Marti and I are the only people in the spa area that are under the age of 50 in the whole place. Well, I'm in my little closet area and the person comes to wrap my sheet around me, what I didn't know is that I was supposed to turn around and face the wall, but I didn't. So, I'm standing there facing the little spa lady full frontal and she starts yelling me to turn around. That was discomfort moment #1. She wraps the sheet around me escorts me to the waiting area and then takes me back to this big room that has the mineral baths on one side and little cubicles with massage tables on the other. There are all these older women wandering around in their togas moving from salt scrub to mineral bath to God-knows-what. I lay down on my table and the wiry little masseuse starts giving me an old school rub-down. It was really not all that relaxing and very uncomfortable especially since I had to go to the bathroom the entire time.

I didn't go back for another massage for many, many years.

I was thinking about this today as I was having a wonderful massage at La Belle Spa by Donald and I started thinking about how much my Grandma would have loved this place. It started out with a nice foot soak with some crackers and nuts while I stared into a fire. Then Donald came and took me into a private room, with soft lights and soothing music being piped in...so very different than my first experience.

And as he proceeded to work the knots out of my back, I slowly began to relax and stopped resisting, and as I did so I tried to silence the running discussion in my head. I couldn't quite silence the voice in my head completely because as I lay there being kneaded like bread dough, I was thinking "how do I want to phrase this in my blog...."

2009...I'm promising myself more massages. They are SOOOO worth it!!