It sometimes blows me away when I think about my grandmother. Who had a set of the same sorority friends since she was in college, organizing dinners and card games and outings together.

About how she managed a home and a farm, keeping everything pristine save for a dusting of dog and cat hair (a house without a pet is not a house at all). I think about mental load of keeping track of the logistics of the annual travel to their house in Florida, where an entirely different set of friends organize dinner and cards and outings.

And I try to put myself into her shoes, try to stretch my brain to understand the mental weight carrying all of that must have been, and it makes me understand and appreciate how intelligent and talented she was. All those things she did that just thinking about make me need a nap. What would it have been like if the vet appointments had not been made, or the doctor’s appointments, or that annual check-in with the lawyer to update wills and check that their finances could still handle their annual voyage to the mangroves and canals?

Her handwriting was beautiful and she wrote daily in her planner, and wrote letters in that script to make sure her friends and family knew she was thinking about them. Her hand-written recipes were always in perfect condition, a patterned index card always at the ready to rewrite the chicken and dumplings recipe if some wayward broth found the previous.

I may be able to close my eyes and spin a world into existence. I might be able to turn my head to the cosmos and decipher the physics behind the light, but I will never be able to keep the anniversaries and birthdays of my friends in my head, knowing the perfect present for each one. I can’t keep a planner longer than a month, keeping track of my day-to-day, and recipe cards don’t get recopied the moment they are splashed in broth in my life.

But there is a dog and there is a cat, so my house is a home. And I can sit and think about the intelligence of a woman who stacked the messy chaos of life into neat little piles for us, so that we could always find what we needed, whether it was that chicken and dumplings recipe, the deed to a house, or our great aunt’s favorite type of flower.