Grandma "Blue Car"

This is a post more for our kids, by Mark, to remember my grandmother, Jean Leith.

My siblings and I call her Grandma "Blue Car" because she had a blue car. We really liked to keep it simple. I don't know who came up with it or why it stuck, but it lasted for a long time. I'm not sure it was her favorite name she was called, but it has a special meaning to me.

Jaxon, while you will never remember your great-grandmother, Jean, she had many memories of you. One of her favorite activities in her later years was compiling scrapbooks, collecting all her memories and putting them on page after page. Some of the last pages she made included her memories of you. She was able to put together these pages from her faithful photography that she passed on to my. In high school, I took an interest in photography and upon hearing about this, Grandma found her photography "how to" books and gave them to me. I remember going with her to Fox Photos almost every visit to Denton to pick up a new batch of developed film.

Your great-grandmother was not lacking in memories to fill the pages of her scrapbooks. Some of my earliest memories of my Grandma included receiving packages from London from one of her globe-trotting trips. She loved to visit London and in London she loved to visit Harrod's. One of her traditions was buying a commemorative holiday bear for me and your uncle and aunts. Jaxon, you like to play with those bears when you visit Zu and Mini's house.

I remember visiting Grandma and Grandpa's house and always wanting to play with the matchbox cars that they kept under the blue chair. I also remember the playground across the creek and the tire swing under the fort structure that we could spin around really fast. I also remember that it was a treat to visit because Abilene did not get the Disney channel, but Grandma did.

I was introduced to Thomas the Tank before it was in America since Grandma would bring books from England back from her travels. I grew up with books that said "mum" and "oi!". These books had traveled great distances, just as Grandma had.

While my kids will never remember her life directly, her story continues through my life as parts of her passions have shaped who I am today.

Mark