There’s a big part of me that just wants to walk into my grandmother’s old house near Windsor and Lakeview and find her sitting in her favorite chair, her TV tray in front of her, watching the soaps.

On that tray, you’d find the day’s essentials neatly arranged: a single tube of lipstick, a romance magazine, and a glass of Pepsi. Maybe there’d be a box of stationary she was working through and a pen she’d certainly had for years.

The television was the focal point of her day. “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives,” the narrator would intone at the start of her favorite show.

My grandmother was a class act. She’d been to finishing school as a young woman, always looked impeccable, and kept a pristine home. But I never understood her taste in books, magazines, or television. She had tabloids strewn about with headlines screaming about celebrities, aliens and ghosts.

In her guestroom closet was a vast collection of Harlequin romance novels–hundreds of them, neatly stacked from floor to ceiling. Once I was old enough, I began to wonder why she wasn’t more curious about the real world. What was it about romance that captivated her? By then, it seemed more like a fairytale genre than anything grounded in real life. Maybe it was because she never had to think all that hard about life. She was an only child, well cared for by parents who had done well.

Her life stood in sharp contrast to mine. My mother worked. My grandmother never held a job. Our house was cluttered with encyclopedias and history books and signs of a working mother; hers was tidy and serene. In our home, cooking was a necessity. In hers, it was a craft–executed without fuss, often from memory, and always served with polish.

Still, my brothers and I loved going there. It felt like visiting a foreign land–one ruled by a woman untouched by feminism. The 1970s were years of cultural upheaval, political distrust, social liberation, and economic strain. But you’d never know it inside my grandmother’s living room. Life carried on, undisturbed, exactly as it always had. She wasn’t looking to expand her consciousness, rewrite her gender role, or burn her bra. She was perfectly content with the world she’d built–lipstick, love stories, and all.

This is, I believe, the way it should be. The older generation has a quiet responsibility–to hold steady the beliefs, manners, and mores of their time. Not out of stubbornness or nostalgia, but as a form of cultural ballast. In a world that constantly reinvents itself, we need someone to remember how things were–not to resist change, but to remind us that not all change is progress.

When the younger generation is busy dismantling and rebuilding, someone needs to preserve the thread of continuity. The rituals. The values. The small courtesies that once shaped a life. It’s not about imposing the past on the present–it’s about giving the present something to push against, something to reflect upon. That friction is part of the cycle.

In this way, our beliefs become less like brittle artifacts and more like heirlooms–held up to the light, examined, sometimes revised, but never completely discarded. The past has a role in the present, and the elders are its keepers.

And so much of her was adopted by me and passed along to my own daughters. I love to cook, and so do they. They believe life should be special–whether they’re setting a table, planning a meal, or wrapping a present. They know that little things matter, and that beauty–however simple–is worth creating.

This is how my grandmother lives on: in the scent of something baking, in a handwritten note, in a home that feels both tended and loved. She didn’t need to shout her values; she lived them. And in doing so, she left a legacy that whispers through generations.

I am actually filled with gratitude that the woman who taught me so much about family and home knew nothing about feminism. She spent days taking care of family, feeding us, spoiling us, comforting us. Nobody has ever once complained about or critized her role in our lives. She wasn’t confused or conflicted. She was an icon–one that we felt lucky to have in our lives.