Before there was a Granny Plants, there was just Granny. Mine. Nana to her grandkids, Mom to my sibs and I — but better known around here as Nana. And I'm realizing more every year that she's the reason any of this exists at all.
Here's the funny part: she didn't teach me to sew. She sent me to lessons instead, like a woman who knew her own limits and respected mine enough to outsource them. She didn't teach me to cook or can, either. What she did was plant a seed, quite literally, in the form of a garden that had fully abandoned any pretense of staying inside its borders, a house absolutely overrun with plants that had never once been asked permission to take over a windowsill, and jam.
The jam. Let's talk about the jam.
She sealed it with wax. WAX. If you don't know what that means, it means Nana was out here doing things food safety guidelines would like to have a serious conversation with her about, decades before I ever called myself a rebel canner. I didn't just come by this honestly — I came by it genetically. She was rebelling before rebelling was a whole personal brand.
And then there was the freezer, packed corner to corner with sweet corn, and the great unspoken family law that governed our entire household growing up: expiration dates are a suggestion. A gentle one. More of a "just so you know" than an actual rule. I recently found a 10,000-year-old container of sea salt in my own cupboard that is, and I quote the label, going to expire in six months. Six months! After ten millennia! The audacity of that salt, acting like it's got somewhere to be. Nana, if you're watching, I hope you're as delighted by that as I am, because I know exactly where I learned to laugh at an expiration date like it owes me money.
She never once told me these things were lessons. She was just living her life, growing too many plants, freezing too much corn, sealing jam with actual candle wax like a woman with nothing left to prove to anybody. But I was watching the whole time, and here I am now, teaching a whole internet full of people to trust their own kitchens the same way she trusted hers.
So today's post is really just this: thank you, Nana. You didn't teach me to sew or can, and somehow you taught me everything.
And speaking of things she inspired without meaning to — I've been working on something new for the sewing room. You know those adorable stroller bags every new mama carries these days? I got to thinking: I'm an old momma now, in the grandmother sense, and the OG Granny in my life deserves a nod too. So I'm building the Walker Companion Bag — a proper, well-made bag for walkers, for the folks in nursing homes and assisted living who never got a cute accessory to call their own. New mamas get stroller bags. It's about time our elders got something made with just as much love. More on that soon — I'm sewing the first one very shortly, and I have a feeling it's going to matter more than most things I've made.
— Granny
🎨 graphic design assist
