I've spent a lot of time wondering where I might have gotten my creative talent from, and while I believe it is a mix of things, I firmly believe that at least a good, solid part of it is from my grandmother. She never wrote, as far as I know; she used to paint (landscapes were her favourite), but as far as I can remember, nobody could craft a story like she could.

And she had stories by the hundreds. Every possible little interesting detail that could happen, seemed to have happened to her.

There was the time she jumped off the second storey of a house with some encouragement from the neighbourhood boys, and landed on a nail, and had to go to the doctor; or the time when she refused to drink buttermilk so her mother had to sneak her dinner in the garage; or the adventures she used to have with one of her best friends who lived on a dairy farm. My grandmother always loved the black and white milk cows.

She used to tell stories of the war; how she used to smuggle in chunks of meat past the Nazis by putting the meat down her shirt, how she sold her favourite doll with real hair and porcelain features to get that meat. How, one time when she was sunbathing, an airplane flew overhead—and then flew overhead again. And again; until she realised that they were copping looks because she was not wearing anything that was decent (or in later versions of the story, when I was older, how she wasn’t wearing much of anything at all.)

She told stories about how, when she was just barely an adult, she got a job as a piano player at a ritzy little club in Amsterdam, and the songs she'd play for the soldiers. She told, less frequently, about the car crash she'd been in during her 20s.

She married my grandfather, and with him travelled (it seems) everywhere. He worked for a prominent airline, so they got to go many places and see many things; a lot of those things included the adventures that my father and aunt would get up to.

Like the time that my father and my aunt flooded a room so that they could float the mattress in the room, and how my grandmother discovered it only when water started running down the stairs. Or the time when my father discovered that his bedroom key was the exact same key that used to open the big chocolate pantry that my grandmother had and it took weeks before she discovered the truth of the missing chocolate bars.

There are other stories, so many other stories; ones that I heard and have not mentioned here, or ones that she was going to tell me when I got older. I'm older now, and we never really got the chance to share stories again.

My grandmother died today.

I'm going to miss her. I'm going to miss the way it felt to sit on her lap and to hug her, I'm going to miss the sound of her voice and her particular accent that nobody else has, and I'm going to miss the way her perfume smelled. It was distinctive, kind of sweet and spicy at once, and I've never managed to find something that smells remotely similar. I'm going to miss the nativity plays my brother and I, and our cousins used to put on for her and the rest of the family, and I'm going to miss the way she made cucumber salad in apple vinegar. I'm going to miss the smell of her peanut sauce; even though I was a picky eater when I was younger, and never really liked the taste. It doesn't matter. I'm still going to miss the smell.

I'm going to miss the way she used to sneak me and my brother biscuits but only one each before dinner; and I'm going to miss the way she always liked to see my drawings, even though I wasn't very good.

She was suffering towards the end, I know that—and I know she lived the fullest life I can even imagine. But I'm going to miss her—and her stories.

I am so glad, and honoured to have known her and even some of her stories; but I wish I could have heard more.