(*Editor's Note: For those of you who don't know, Emily is my daughter and a regular contributor to this blog, so it's not unusual if we sometimes write/sound the same! Unbeknownst to each other, we both wrote about my husband's mother . Please forgive any redundancy as we honor one of our favorite women...)

Let me tell you a little bit about Isabel Horsfall. Married to Joe, mother of Joan, Bill, Sharon and Ned, grandmother of twelve, and great-grandmother of eighteen.

I've known her as Grandma. The grandma that only lived twenty-five minutes away but the drive always felt like an eternity. With a backyard that could be used for sledding, and a basement that was perfect for roller-skating. The candy dish full of the caramels with the cream in the middle and the freezer stocked with popsicles in the summertime.

She left the knobs on the oven dirty when she cooked - which was all the time! She'd make vegetable soup and have a special pot set aside just for me (no tomatoes or onions, thank you very much). She tried to hide the chocolate peanut butter Buckeyes she made near Christmastime so they wouldn't get eaten all at once but we could always find them.

She hated watching you bite your nails and made you sit on your hands to keep you from doing it. She insisted you say "rear-end" instead of that awful "b" word. She was a hard-core Canasta player, and it was rare you could beat her at a game. She loved hearing us practice the piano, bad notes and all, and told us we never practiced enough (partly because it was true, and partly because she could never hear us play enough). I never ever once heard her raise her voice or say anything negative about anyone or anything. She was the most pleasant, happy, understanding person I've ever known.

I'm full of memories, and yet there was still so much I didn't know about her. I didn't know what she was like as a girl, or what made her fall for my Grandpa, how she came to know the Lord or what her favorite verse was. What I do know is that she loved her Lord and she loved her family, and she loved so very well.

We'll miss you Grandma, but we'll hold onto your legacy of love and service and do our best to do it half as well as you did.

Emily

Labels: Emily