My Two Grandmothers were Really My Father's Two Older Sisters

When I was around eleven or twelve, I told a lie that my father's two older sisters were my grandmothers. The reason being that everyone had a grandmother or two and I did not. They were gone before I was born. One day I told my girlfriend Myra that they lived together to save expenses because their husbands were deceased and they were poor. Some days she and I walked home from school and she lived around the corner from these two grandmothers/my aunts. She did not believe me that they were 2 grandmothers, one was my father's mother and the other one was my mother's mother. She said that cannot be true.

So I insisted they were and she asked could she come in and see them because I stayed there after school until my Mom came to pick me up after her work. So I said, they would love to meet you but I was praying they would not give my lie away. So in we came and I introduced Myra to Aunt Jenny and Aunt Sarah. I said there are my grandmothers and Myra said to Jenny, you look like you are sisters. Aunt Jenny picked up that I had told her they were my grandmothers. Jenny said to Myra , we are her grandmothers, I am her father's mother and this lady Sarah is her mother's mother. Myra looked at both of them and mumbled I think that is not so.

So they offered her a cookie and a glass of milk still insisting they were my grandmothers. She went home and said, this does not make sense, but OK I believe you.

There is a saying fool me once, ok, fool me a second time, I am the fool.

I thanked Aunts that they had gone along with my deception and they laughed about it. Mom came to get me and I told her and she laughed too. Mom's mom had passed on a year before I was born and Dad's mom had passed on several years before I was born.

My husband was in the Korean War and he had quite an important job. He was a High Speed Radio Operator and their job was using Morse Code of dots and dashes to send messages to our troops five or six miles away via radio waves. Things are different now, I have to Google it and see if it is still used.

So Myra wherever you reside and are still living, here is the truth. They were Dad's two older sisters, they were about 15 years older than Dad and they adored me as if I were their granddaughter and they enjoyed the deception a young girl performed. If my husband had been there, he could have dot and dashed her name and she would have loved that. She was lucky to have one grandmother in our hometown and one living in Canada. I was envious of her and so I imagined in my mind these two old ladies were my grandparents and the one way to reason it out was their living together even though not sisters and I knew it was for lack of much money being available, so they figured out to live together was nice and they were company with each other and they were nice ladies who kept a clean apartment and cooked and listened to the radio, no TV then and they treated me like a grandkid they never had.

So all was well and I loved them and they loved me.

Love is a many splendored thing and I had a special love given to me by these two elderly ladies and they had my love to them as if I was their granddaughter.

Sometimes lies can be sweet if they are said with good meaning. Elita Sohmer Clayman Fairfax Station PATCH