"Grandma Troubles" by Tanya E.E.E. Schmid

 – feisty Norwegian—if that’s not redundant

Climbing ladders and such in her 80’s, Grandma knew how to worry her family.

Tanya Elizabeth Egeness Epp Schmid of the Taste Life Twice Writers was a Doctor of Oriental Medicine until 2014 when she started a permaculture farm. Her work has appeared in Valparaiso Fiction Review, Sky Island Journal, Canary Literary Magazine, Whistling Shade, Flash Fiction Magazine, and others. Tanya was long-listed in Pulp Literature’s 2021 Flash Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in Poet’s Choice Global Warming Anthology, and Quillkeeper’s Summer Solstice Anthology 2021. She is a teacher of Kyudo (Zen archery) and the author of “Tanya’s Collection of Zen Stories.” A native of Wisconsin, she now lives in Ascona, Switzerland.  www.tanyaswriting.com

Tanya E.E.E. Schmid

Author’s Talk

Whether I’m in my hometown in Wisconsin or sitting along the Lago Maggiore in Switzerland, where I live, it’s still me sitting down to lunch. My practice of Kyudo, better known as Zen archery, reminds me of that. I practice letting go of my thoughts, so I can be fully in the moment as I wield my six-foot Japanese bow. Amazing, what you notice when you show up for the moment—whether shooting or eating a sandwich. Plus, you tend to feel it down to your toes when the paper target echoes the thud of a solid hit. 

Getting back to lunch, I broke a tooth this week. Half of it just up and disappeared when I bit into my cheese sandwich. Made me feel old. Reminded me of my grandmother, who didn’t have dentures like all her friends, but still had her own—albeit thin—teeth, edged in real gold. She was an avid seamstress and, until the day she died at age ninety-eight, she could still thread a needle and bite off the thread with her two front incisors. I remember her pinched lips holding four or five stick pins as she altered the length of my skirt, the gentle touch of her papery fingers as she took measurements for the clothing she sewed for me as a child.  

When I was seventeen, I stood in my white cotton underwear in front of her hallway’s full-length mirror—as we always did when new clothes were on the agenda—and closed my eyes as her tape measure ran the length of my arms, my legs, my bust and waist. I slipped into that peaceful feeling you get when someone’s washing your hair at the hairdressers. It was a very Zen experience, relaxed in the present moment. No anger about the past, no fear of the future, just my grandmother’s loving hands turning me this way and that. Then with one of her short laughs, she patted me on the stomach and said, “I used to have a flat tummy just like that.” I opened my eyes, looked at my grandmother’s small balloon of a belly, her white hair, her crinkled eyes smiling up at me from where she was crouched, and realized for the first time that she, too, had been seventeen once. This one’s for you, Grandma. - Tanya E.E.E. Schmid