Writing Prompt Response

A True Story from “B” Avenue

A snapshot of my grandma and her best friend

Grandma Dagmar and her best friend Helen used to walk all over our neighborhood, especially on long summer evenings. They liked the views of the water as they walked downhill, and they especially liked snooping around the quiet building sites of new houses or major remodels where no one would be at home.

They lived across from each other on “B” Avenue, a name I’ve always found much cooler than numbered streets. Helen had a husband named Jack and a big fluffy dog named Pal, and then she was a widow for many years. Grandma Dagmar was a longtime divorcee who had a succession of rescued cats with names like Cotton and Elizabeth.

Grandma Dagmar would put the “B” for “B” Avenue in quotation marks when she wrote it on a form or as the return address on an envelope. The internet says the quotation marks aren’t required, but it seems wrong to write it without them after seeing it that way so many times in her handwriting.

I remember there used to be a donkey who lived in a big, grassy yard not far away if you walked south down “B” and took a right onto Fir Street. If you try to research these addresses now, you just find maps and real estate price estimates.

Grandma Dagmar loved to tell the following story about the time that she and Helen were peeking into the windows of an almost-finished house. They’d climbed onto the porch to have a better look, and grandma was figuring out what all the rooms must be.

“There’s the living room,” Grandma Dagmar said, “and the dining room, and you can just see where the kitchen starts…”

Here she realized that Helen wasn’t responding as usual, so she looked around.

“And there was Helen,” Grandma Dagmar could always barely get this part out from laughing so hard. “There was Helen in the hydrangea bush!”

Helen had fallen off the porch, but wasn’t to be heard over her friend’s narration about the layout of the house. Grandma Dagmar finally saw her and helped pull her out of the hydrangea where she was stuck. Then Grandma Dagmar laughed for about 30 more years as she retold the story (never in front of Helen, as far as I know).

As they got older, they called each other much more than they saw each other. It got to be hard to walk across the street. My dad stopped by and picked up Grandma Dagmar’s mail from the mailboxes by the curb for her every day, and Helen’s younger sister and niece moved in with her.

One time, Helen called my dad when Grandma Dagmar came over to Helen’s house in a confused state and spoke Norwegian instead of English. Dad asked Helen to call 911 and said he’d meet the ambulance at the hospital. Turns out Grandma Dagmar was having a stroke. By the next day, she was speaking English again and otherwise back to her usual self, and she lived for another 15 years.

When Grandma Dagmar died a few years ago, she was 96. My dad tried to get in touch with Helen, but there was no answer when he called, and when he left messages, he never received a callback. He left a note in her mailbox, but no reply. The internet says that Helen is 105 years old and still owns her house on “B.” I wonder if it’s true.

Thanks to E. Katherine Kottaras for the “seed words writing prompt #1.” The two words in bold, water and look, are from the prompt’s word list. I’ve been meaning to tell this story about my grandma, and the prompt brought it to mind. I hope you enjoyed reading it.