Coastal grandma vibe has many interpretations

I've heard the term "Coastal Grandma" a few times lately and wondered what it meant. I am now a grandma myself, living on the coast, so I must be a coastal grandma, whatever it means.

I finally heard of it in interior decorating terms, but that's only part of the story. Even young women are crocheting, knitting, quilting and tatting to relax. My pink house in Milton definitely has its grandmotherly overtones, as I inherited it from my mother. We certainly had our arguments about style, mostly fashion choices, but her grandmotherly presence is still here.

When we used to spend summers at the beach, we would ride into Henlopen Acres to visit an antiques store called The Barn; if you're an older beach person, you might remember it. There, my mother would purchase antiques almost weekly, such as washstands, Boston benches or marble-top tables, to name a few.

My house here still has two beautiful rose velvet Victorian chairs purchased from the J. Conn Scott store in Selbyville. Sixty-five years old or so, they are still spotless, even though she allowed her well-fed cocker spaniel, Dandy Boy, to sleep on them.

Though we had our differences, I know there must be some DNA association, as I once needed money and sold a bunch of my knickknacks at a resale store. The next time I went to her house for our Monday night dinner, I saw that my mother had unknowingly purchased the same items I sold, and they were showcased on her shelf! I never revealed that they had once been mine.

Anyway, I finally found a newspaper article defining the term coastal grandma. It's an aesthetic inspired by characters in movies by filmmaker Nancy Meyers, with stars like Diane Keaton, for example. In the late 1960s-early 1970s, there was a revival of granny glasses and long granny dresses, even lace-up boots! I recently noticed a brief flurry of younger people wearing large, round, wire-rimmed granny glasses. However, I think when you're an actual granny,  the look is too close to reality to count as fashion.

My own maternal grandmother who lived with us inspired my lifelong love of crafts. She braided/plaited circular rugs out of scraps of cloth and even Bond Bread plastic wrappers. She also covered bottle caps with crochet, fashioning grape-themed coasters and trivets to protect tables from hot plates. Banana pudding with "nillas," vanilla wafers with sliced bananas, was a favorite dessert. She could sew suits good enough for my very particular mother to wear to college in the 1930s. She had also been a milliner back in Philadelphia in the ‘30s.

My great-aunt Edna from Selbyville knitted afghan quilts. Puzzles were put together on our back porch card tables during the summer, and you could hear the slap-slap-slap sound of cards being played for solitaire when hands weren't busy with creating.

I recently found a TV documentary called "The Babushkas of Chernobyl." These resilient grandmas returned to their homes near the catastrophe site, where they seemed really happy and resourceful in their colorful scarves, picking berries and mushrooms, and sometimes imbibing shots of vodka.

My grandmother kept diaries for over 50 years. I think she wanted to be a writer. They're filled with notes on days spent ironing, sprinkling the clothes with water from Coke bottles (the old green glass kind with holes punched into the bottle cap), baking and playing bingo at the Milton Fire Hall.

Last weekend, my husband Jeff and I babysat for two of our four grandsons while their parents attended a wedding. I had expected to be stepping on the Legos they crave, scattered all over the playroom floor, but lo and behold, they had already completed the Lego projects and had them displayed, so this coastal grandma was really impressed!

They also drew really good pictures. The paper filled in, no strip of blue sky, strip of green grass, swing set and sun, which is the usual. Eight-year old Jamie even kept a small dictionary by his side to look up words he didn't know, like his coastal grandmother, me! The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, I think.