Prompt #2: Someone who has influenced me…

Someone who influenced me is my grandmother, Dammy. She chose to be Grammy but when I was little, I replaced my /gr/ sound with /d/. Long after I mastered the correct sounds, forever in fact, she was Dammy to me. This was really only a problem when I was young, sitting in a shopping cart. When she picked produce from the bin a bit down the aisle, I lost sight of her and called out, in my toddler voice, ‘Dam!’ “Dam!” She talked about the looks she received from fellow shoppers until the day she died. We always lived close to my grandparents, first a short drive away and then just a walk. Dammy and Dampy (ideally Grampy but now you know the story) were both ever present when I was young but it is Dammy who fills so many of my childhood memories. I am a reader because of all the stories both Mom and Dad read to me but also the time Dammy spent reading poem after poem, like the Swing and The Land of Counterpane by Robert Louis Stevenson and then the Dutch Twins over and over again. As I grew, she was my research partner, going to the public library while I was in school checking out every book on the topic of my latest school project. As a teenager and young adult, her love started to feel a bit more like nagging. She insisted I needed a proper winter coat or a better purse or enough dramamine for my trip to Europe. But now that I have become the ‘nagger’ instead of the ‘naggee’, it is clear she loved me and influenced me right to the end. #10thingstotellyou

I am joining the amazing Laura Tremain of 10 Things to Tell You in her latest Instagram challenge #10thingstotellyou. Laura will provide the prompts and we provide the conversation. Her goal is to get people to “share the things about yourself that usually get glossed over. They type of things you want friends to know, but for some reason never come up.”