Week 8 Prompts, 2 of 3

33. "We are gathered here today to remember....."

Stuffing my face when I was five.  That's what I remember of my great-grandmother Beaulah.  I loved her, I'm sure.  But in fact, most of my memories of her revolve around me, not her.  Of my experiences at her house; not our conversations, and barely her face.  Just me.  And her dead body.  So pale and waxy at the funeral home, it was the first dead body I had ever seen.  Did I have to kiss her cheek? I asked in a horrified voice, watching those in front of me do so.  No, I was told.  I remember the relief I felt, looking at that powdery, still cheek.
She loved me, I'm sure.  My mother brought me to Grammie Beaulah's (as we called her) house for lunch.  Adults were always entertained by my voracious appetite at that age.  Beaulah emptied her refrigerator trying to feed me.  I don't remember most of what was offered, but I do remember she finally was down to just cottage cheese.  I had never had the stuff before, but determined to maintain my apparently hilarious status as a food monster, I ate that too.  I don't think I'd have eaten it otherwise.
I remember, too, the dining room, connected to the kitchen, with its big wooden table surrounded by cabinets of expensive china dishes.  Those dishes made me nervous.  I was scared I would break one and get in trouble.  Our family would gather in the dining room for big, traditional meals.  I was always bored by the adult conversation that flowed over my head.  I stared at the dishes.  I wanted to touch them.
In the living room, with its mottled brown rug, was a plastic container filled with marbles.  My older sister and I fought like ogres over who got to play with the marbles.  Finally we would separate them out and split them in half, snarling at each other, convinced that the other had gotten most of the good ones.  I would snatch an aquamarine and white swirled marble, my sister would steal a fire red and orange one from my hoard.  We would snipe back and forth, hugging them close to us like dragons resting on their gold, until it was time to go home.  I don't remember actually playing with the marbles.
Beaulah lived across from a large graveyard, her yard and the street sloping toward the marble stones.  Playing at the edge of the yard, toys would often roll over to the side of the dead, and it was always an unpleasant task to go and fetch them.  One time a golf ball I had rolled over there.  I searched and I searched, having a vague sense of where it had gone, but coming up empty handed.  I hurried back to the other side of the street again, convinced that ghosts had my golf ball now.
Another memory comes to mind.  Once, helping clean out Grammie Beualah's garage after she had died, I found a dead hummingbird.  I don't know why, but I somehow convinced myself that it was a stuffed hummingbird that Beualah had owned, and therefore okay to touch.  I picked up its frail body, admiring the delicate wings, the metallic green feathers, the miniscule feet.  I played with it for awhile, making it swoop around the room, turning its head this way and that, until finally the head came off in my hands.  I discreetly put the hummingbird back where I had found it and moved on.
I wonder now what Grammie Beaulah would think of all the random memories I have of her and her home, stored like dusty boxes in the recesses of my mind?  That when I try to think of her, the first thing I think of is stuffing myself with cottage cheese.  And of that powdery, still cheek.