Grandma would take all the grandkids for a week or two over the summer, parents were optional. She’d cook three square meals for her squadron of grandkids as we played outside.

We were always swimming or begging an adult to take us out on the boat. I learned to water ski on two then one skis, but she was nowhere near. She was back at the house like a workhorse.

Her vacation home was a vacation for everyone, but her.

There were piles of laundry and dishes and when those were done she’d mend. I can’t remember her ever sitting back in her chair and reading a magazine or watching a show. She always had a chore to do, a grocery list to make. Betty had an inner drive to get ahead; she never got caught flat footed by the tidal wave of chores.

It was a rare moment when she’d call to us, “Get in the boat, I’m taking you all to Ben Franklin’s.” I don’t remember what preempted this need to get the house free from little kids. But free the house she did.

Five or more of my cousins, my sister and I would throw a t-shirt over our swimsuits and jump in the speed boat. Grandma would drive across the water with her gaggle of grandkids, her wrinkles deeply embedded in her forehead and cheeks, so much so that her face looked expressionless, a mountainous land. Once docked, we’d skip and run ahead. My cousins always screamed about something that I wouldn’t understand like how great a phosphate was until I tried it. Every now and then Grandma would shush us, or grab one of our hands, usually mine.

The line of us — at least six little girls and one mentally handicapped boy — was something people must have commented on as the bell jingled and we entered the quiet of Ben Franklin’s. The sweet mixed with mothball smell was always so strong it could knock me over. She’d give us each a few crisp dollars. The choices were endless and important. This place was exotic to me who only knew of grocery chains.

Grandma would wait for the last of us to finish our purchases then heard us over to the lunch counter of the local pharmacy. She’d sit with us in a long line over looking the main street and have her cigarette, poised at the tips of her fingers. The smoke danced around her hand, this one moment of glamor.

Her lake house was a two-story, the bottom half air-conditioned, and the top — including her kitchen and bedroom — could be cooled only by the Iowa breeze. One day, a storm pelted the house, rain came down so hard the lake, only a few feet from our door, was obscured. We revealed in the weather: have you ever swum and not known where the air begins?

That night I was supposed to be asleep but I snuck up, restless, and found Grandma sitting on the porch. The ping of rain on the tin roof made talking impossible. I sat next to her in her cotton nightgown, snuggled into the curve of her arm and the two of us listened until the melody became a sound united in our dreams.