Growing up my sister and I split our weekends at our Grandmothers’ homes. This is the last in a series of two reminiscing about those weekends.

On the weekends we stayed with GranMerle, we’d make spaghetti, eat Oatmeal Creme Pies like they were going out of style, play smut, dominoes, and a host of other card games, listen to GranMerle recall moments from her childhood, listen to 8-track tapes, play with the Playmobil dollhouse, and eat the best homemade banana pudding (made by GranMerle, of course). Not to mention accompanying her to her weekly hair appointment, playing Barbies, and generally being her shadow for about 36 hours.

But one of the things I remember most is watching Mary Poppins practically every weekend we stayed with her. [Which led me to buy it when the limited DVD edition came out]. What is it about Mary Poppins that is so intriguing? Is it the fantasy sidewalk chalk world they jump into? The practically perfect measuring tape Mary uses? The spoonfuls of sugar she encourages the children to take medicine with? Or maybe dancing chimney sweeps, which I’m pretty sure led to me inquiring to my parents about a chimney sweep of our own once or twice. There’s also that hilarious guy named Dick van Dyke…Through it all, I fondly remember Grandmerle often opening up her hide-a-bed sofa for us to pile up and watch Mary Poppins on, she would always be totally concentrated on the movie just as we were, until we bribed her for another Oatmeal Creme Pie, that is…

I don’t know if it was coincidence or not that Julie Andrews had the starring role in both movies that we obsessively watched at our Grandmothers’ homes, but either way it helped me name her one of my favorite actresses of all time. To this day, I cannot get over how much love our grandmothers gave us when we visited them. I’m sure they could quote the movies in their sleep, but they never once complained about having to watch them over and over and over again with us. There truly is nothing like a grandmother’s love.