On Oranges and Air Pop

This morning I ate my first orange of the season. Because it's still early, the rind was too thick to peel, so I pulled out a knife and cut it the Nana way. The first juicy bite sent me back to a childhood of orange trees, off-the-vine boysenberries with French vanilla ice cream, air pop popcorn, puzzles, century-old books and an heirloom piano, but most of all to my vivacious, generous, intelligent and beautiful great-grandmother, Hannah Harris. I spend at least two hours a week at Nana's house, between piano lessons down the street at Aunt Candy's, and my parents' weekly date night. I loved it. Nana was simple and no-nonsense - she was a newly-wed during the Depression and knew how to create big adventures out of the littlest things. She'd send us to the backyard to pick oranges or boysenberries, or walk with us to the library or park, or hand us each a rake and send us out to rake the leaves for her and her neighbors. Nana was smart - salutatorian of her high school class in the 1920s - and always encouraged me to reach for my dreams. Nana absolutely loved the temple. I remember her sitting at her tiny kitchen table, surrounded by ordinance cards, painstakingly copying names from weathered copies of microfilms onto the cards to send to the temple with her friends in the ward. Nana never learned to drive, so she walked everywhere and loved it. When she developed Alzheimer's and her children sent her to a home in Minnesota, I was heartbroken. She passed away when I was 20. I last saw her when I was 16. I still miss her. But whenever I make air pop, or go to the temple, or study for a big test, or bite into an orange cut Nana-style, I smile, because it's in the little things that this great woman's legacy lives on. And someday when I have a daughter, Nana's name will be carried on too, in my little Hannah Rose.